Overview
- The period under consideration is often overlooked and resistant to easy periodization
- Explores how four authors of the period ‘wrote back’ to their parent generation, contesting the Romantic-era constructions of childhood, parenthood and education into which they were written by their author-fathers
- First study to read Hartley and Sarah Coleridge together
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print (PERCP)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Reviews
“Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs is remarkably thorough in terms of its scope, making fine differentiations in such a way that each text that Turner considers reveals itself as at once part of a larger tradition and yet uncompromisingly its own distinct object.” (D. B. Ruderman, European Romantic Review, Vol. 30 (1), 2019)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs
Book Subtitle: Reproduction and Retrospection, 1820 - 1850
Authors: Beatrice Turner
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64970-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-64969-6Published: 02 November 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87914-7Published: 18 May 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-64970-2Published: 17 October 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6516
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6524
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 245
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Childhood, Adolescence and Society