Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction And Retrospection, 1820 - 1850 (palgrave Studies In The Enlightenment, Romanticism And The Cultures Of Print)
by Beatrice Turner /
2017 / English / PDF
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This book views Romantic literature’s discourses of childhood,
education, and reproduction through the eyes of four early
nineteenth-century British authors who were uniquely implicated
in those discourses. Hartley and Sara Coleridge, children of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and
William Godwin Jr, children of William Godwin, shared the
predicament of being both ‘real’ and ‘literary’ children. All the
children of authors who helped shape culturally-definitive
Romantic-period ideas about childhood, they wrote back to their
fathers in order to understand and to resist the ways in which
they were produced by paternal texts which foreclose the
possibility of the child’s own regeneration. This study proposes
that through this predicament, and their responses to it, the
literature of the period between the Romantic and the Victorian
periods comes into focus, marked by an anxiety not of influence,
but of reproduction. It suggests that one reason why this period
has tended to disappear from view lies in the sense of historical
and aesthetic difference, and productive failure, which this
study uncovers.
This book views Romantic literature’s discourses of childhood,
education, and reproduction through the eyes of four early
nineteenth-century British authors who were uniquely implicated
in those discourses. Hartley and Sara Coleridge, children of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and
William Godwin Jr, children of William Godwin, shared the
predicament of being both ‘real’ and ‘literary’ children. All the
children of authors who helped shape culturally-definitive
Romantic-period ideas about childhood, they wrote back to their
fathers in order to understand and to resist the ways in which
they were produced by paternal texts which foreclose the
possibility of the child’s own regeneration. This study proposes
that through this predicament, and their responses to it, the
literature of the period between the Romantic and the Victorian
periods comes into focus, marked by an anxiety not of influence,
but of reproduction. It suggests that one reason why this period
has tended to disappear from view lies in the sense of historical
and aesthetic difference, and productive failure, which this
study uncovers.
