Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity

by Mnller,Anja

• ISBN13: 9780754655091
• ISBN10: 0754655091
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-05-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This innovative collection of essays re-examines conventional ideas of the history of childhood, exploring the child's increasing prominence in eighteenth-century discourse and the establishment of the category of age as a marker of social distinction alongside race, class and gender. While scholars often approach childhood within the context of a single nation, this collection takes a comparative approach, examining the child in British, German and French contexts and demonstrating the mutual influences between the Continent and Great Britain in the conceptualization of childhood. Covering a wide range of subjects, from scientific and educational discourses on the child and controversies over the child's legal status and leisure activities, to the child as artist and consumer, the essays shed light on well-known novels like Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones, as well as on less-familiar texts such as periodicals, medical writings, trial reports and schoolbooks. Articles on visual culture show how eighteenth-century discourses on childhood are reflected in representations of the child by illustrators and portraitists. The international group of contributors, including Peter Borsay, Patricia Crown, Bernadette Fort, Brigitte Glaser, Klaus Peter Jochum, Dorothy Johnson and Peter Sabor, represent the disciplines of history, literature and art and reflect the collection's commitment to interdisciplinarity. The volume's unique range of topics makes it essential reading for students and scholars concerned with the history and representation of childhood in eighteenth-century culture.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	vii
Notes on Contributors	ix
Acknowledgements	xv
Introduction	1	(12)
Anja Müller
Part 1 Cultural Contexts
1 The Doctor and the Child: Medical Preservation and Management of Children in the Eighteenth Century	13	(12)
Adriana S. Benzaquén
2 Children as Patients in German-Speaking Regions in the Eighteenth Century	25	(8)
Iris Ritzmann
3 Observing Children in an Early Journal of Psychology Karl Philipp Moritz's ΓN&ΩΘI ΣΑYΤON (Know thyself)	33	(10)
Anthony Krupp
4 The Legal Status of Children in Eighteenth-Century England	43	(10)
Anna-Christina Giovanopoulos
5 Children, Adolescents and Fashionable Urban Society in Eighteenth-Century England	53	(10)
Peter Borsay
6 The Child in the Visual Culture of Consumption 1790-1830	63	(18)
Patricia Crown
7 Locke's Education or Rousseau's Freedom Alternative Socializations in Modern Societies	81	(10)
Christoph Houswitschka
Part 2 Literary and Visual Representations
8 Fashioning Age and Identity: Childhood and the Stages of Life in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals	91	(10)
Anja Müller
9 Engaging Identity: Portraits of Children in Late Eighteenth-Century European Art	101	(16)
Dorothy Johnson
10 Greuze and the Ideology of Infant Nursing in Eighteenth-Century France	117	(18)
Bernadette Fort
11 Childhood and Juvenile Delinquency in Eighteenth-Century Newgate Calendars	135	(10)
Uwe Böker
12 Tales of Miracle or Lessons of Morality?	145	(12)
School Editions of Ovid's Metamorphoses as a Means of Shaping the Personalities of British Schoolboys
Sonja Fielitz
13 Defoe's Children	157	(12)
Klaus Peter Jochum
14 Fictionalizing Foundlings	169	(10)
Social Tradition and Change in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones
Jan Hollm
15 Winding up the Clock	179	(10)
The Conception and Birth of Tristram Shandy
Dirk Vanderbeke
16 Gendered Childhoods	189	(10)
On the Discursive Formation of Young Females in the Eighteenth Century
Brigitte Glaser
17 Fashioning the Child Author	199	(12)
Reading Jane Austen's Juvenilia
Peter Sabor
Bibliography	211	(24)
Index	235