Childhood, Literature and Science

How do we understand, imagine and remember childhood? In what ways do cultural representations and scientific discourses meet in their ways of portraying children? Childhood, Literature and Science aims to answer these questions by tracing how images of childhood(s) and children in Western modernity are entangled with notions of innocence and fragility, but also with sin and evilness. Indeed, this interdisciplinary collection investigates how different child figures emerge or disappear in imaginative and social representations, in the memories of adult selves, and in expert knowledge. Questions about childhood in Western modernity, culture and science are also addressed through insightful analysis of a variety of materials from the Enlightenment age to the present day - such as fiction, life narratives, visual images, scientific texts and public writings. Analysing childhood as a discursive construction, Childhood, Literature and Science will appeal to scholars as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as: Childhood Studies, History, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Sociology of the Family.

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

INTRODUCTION: Child Figures as Fragile Subjects Jutta Ahlbeck, Päivi Lappalainen, Kati Launis and Kirsi Tuohela PART I: The Ideal and Subversive Child Päivi Lappalainen: Child Figures in Läsning för barn by Zacharias Topelius Maria Laakso: The Naughty Child in the Early Twentieth Century: Subversive Child Figures and Humor in Jalmari Finne's Children's Literature Jenniliisa 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 Realism Karin Zetterqvist Nelson: The Changing Construction of the Child Figure in Literature on Child Psychotherapy in Sweden 1945-1975 Shaul 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 Dealer PART 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 Modernity Ewa Maciejewska-Mroczek & Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz: Between Monster Child and Innocent Baby: Managing Fear and Hope in Polish Debates on In Vitro Fertilisation PART V: The Lost Child Kirsi Tuohela: The Rise of Inner Subjectivity: Childhood in Early Nineteenth-Century Finnish Autobiographies Roberta Garrett: "A terrible deal for the western parent": Neoliberal Mothering Versus the Teenager Saara Jäntti: Children and Childhoods in Women's Madness Narratives Index