The Precocious Child in Victorian Literature and Culture: Development and Selfhood from Darwin to Freud [Hardcover]

This book examines representations of precocity in Victorian textual culture  canonical literature, childrens fiction, scientific texts, and writing by children  to argue that precocity challenges the idea of progress. It considers how practitioners of literature and science from Wordsworth to Freud represented human development, and the way in which Darwins non-progressive model of evolution troubled the existing model of progression by stages (from childhood inexperience to adult maturity and understanding). Rois?n Laing argues that the precocious child undermines the equation of growth with progress, and thereby facilitates other ways of imagining both individual and species development. The idea represented by the precocious child in Victorian culture  that the adult is not necessarily an improvement on the child, the human not necessarily an improvement on the ape  still troubles us today.

 

Chapter 1-Nineteenth-Century Models of Development: Precocity Before and After Darwin.- Chapter 2-The Child: Non-Precocity in Autobiography.- Chapter 3- Lies and Imagination: Precocity in Childrens Literature.- Chapter 4- The Precocious Child in Victorian Culture: Precocity in Fantasy and in Reality.- Chapter 5- Twentieth-Century Models of Development: Precocity from Darwin to Freud.

Rois?n Laing is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the English Studies Department and the Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies at Durham University, UK. She has published on childhood and nineteenth-century culture in several essay collections and leading journals including the journal of Victorian Culture and The Hendry James Review.

This book examines representations of precocity in Victorian textual culture  canonical literature, childrens fiction, scientific texts, and writing by children  l#