Childhood, Literature and Science

Jutta Ahlbeck is a sociologist and Senior Researcher at the Department of Culture, History and Philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, FinlandPäivi Lappalainen is Professor of Finnish Literature at the University of Turku, FinlandKati Launis is Adjunct Professor of Finnish Literature at the University of Turku, FinlandKirsi Tuohela is Adjunct Professor of Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland

• INTRODUCTION: Child Figures as Fragile SubjectsJutta Ahlbeck, Päivi Lappalainen, Kati Launis and Kirsi TuohelaPART I: The Ideal and Subversive ChildPäivi Lappalainen: Child Figures in Läsning för barn by Zacharias TopeliusMaria Laakso: The Naughty Child in the Early Twentieth Century: Subversive Child Figures and Humor in Jalmari Finne’s Children’s LiteratureJenniliisa Salminen: Child Adults in Soviet Children’s Literature – Lazar Lagin’s The Old Man Hottabych PART II: The "Normal" Child Kati Launis: The Birth of the Modern Child in Finnish Literary RealismKarin Zetterqvist Nelson: The Changing Construction of the Child Figure in Literature on Child Psychotherapy in Sweden 1945–1975Shaul Bar-Haim: The Child's "Position": The Concept of Childhood in Interwar Psychoanalysis PART III: The Sick and Disabled Child Maria Nikolajeva: Visible, Audible and Sentient: Cognitive-Affective Engagement with Disability in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction Leticia Fernández-Fontecha: Little Patients: Photography and the Configuration of the Sick Child in Victorian Britain Karen Lowton: The End of the ‘Experiment’: Positioning Children with Severe Liver Disease as Potential Survivors of Pioneering Liver Transplantation Sarah Hardstaff: "With special obligations": Constructions of Young Adulthood and Caregiving in The Road to Memphis and Seventeen Against the DealerPART IV: The Evil and Victimised Child Eleanor F W Betts: Victim, Monster, Child or Murderer? Representations of Children Who Killed in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers Jutta Ahlbeck: The Nervous Child and the Disease of ModernityEwa Maciejewska-Mroczek & Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz: Between Monster Child and Innocent Baby: Mana

Childhood, Literature, and Science convincingly points to the variety of ways in which children and childhood are something highly evasive, multifaceted, and dependent upon time, space, and the available assortment of discursive categories. This impressive compilation of studies from scholars in the humanities and social sciences gives us new important insights of childhood, and contributes to the interdisciplinary field of Childhood Studies.By stretching the analyses from the Enlightenment until the present day, across science, literature, life writings, and social policy, a complex narrative of western childhood is unfolded. Authors examine children’s literature, psychological testing situations, media debates on children who commit crimes, debates on reproductive technologies, autobiographical fiction, photographs of child patients, and much more, and the reader will be highly rewarded. It becomes clear that the category we in our everyday lives call ‘children’ carries many different meanings and ‘layers’. This volume also gives us a badly-needed readiness for action as citizens. As the editors write: "The notion of childhood is always, at the same time, a notion of adulthood".—Mats Börjesson, Professor and Director of the Section for Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, SwedenThe rich essays collected in Childhood, Literature, and Science demonstrate that research grounded in language analysis and literary criticism has become indispensable for historicising our sense of childhood and youth. The discourses of childhood cannot be captured with essentialist dualisms between purity/innocence and order/discipline, any more than the figures of childhood will come into focus by repeating the obvious truth that childhood is culturally constructed. Readers seeking something more robust will find within these pages thick descriptions and close readings of ideal, subversive, normal, sick, transformative, evil, victimized, and lost childhoods that crossed national boundaries and extended over long periods into the living present.—Patrick J. Ryan, President of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, Kings University College at Western University Canada