Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy

Martina Domines Veliki is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Zagreb, Croatia.Cian Duffy is Professor and Chair of English Literature at Lund University, Sweden.

• Introduction: the Romantic cultures of infancy.- 1. ‘A detached peninsula’: infancy in the work of Thomas De Quincey.- 2.  William Blake’s Infant Joy.- 3. The infant, the mother, and the breast in the paintings of Marguerite Gérard.- 4. Mother at the source: romanticism and infant education.- 5. Coleridge, the ridiculous child, and the limits of Romanticism.- 6. Educational experiments: childhood sympathy, regulation and object relations in Maria Edgeworth’s writing about education.- 7. ‘Advice [...] by one as insignificant as a MOUSE’: human and non-human infancy in eighteenth-century moral animal tales.- 8. William Godwin, Romantic-era historiography and the political cultures of infancy.- 9. Experimenting with children: infants in the scientific imagination.- 10. ‘A wretch so sad, so lorn’: the feral child and the Romantic cultures of infancy.