While much has been written about Irish culture’s apparent obsession with the past and with representing childhood, few critics have explored in detail the position of children’s fiction within such discourses. This book serves to redress these imbalances, illuminating both the manner in which children’s texts engage with complex cultural discourses in contemporary Ireland and the significant contribution that children’s novels and films can make to broader debates concerning Irish identity at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Through close analysis of specific books and films published or produced since 1990, Irish Childhoods offers an insight into contrasting approaches to the representation of Irish history and childhood in recent children’s fiction. Each chapter interrogates the unique manner in which an author or filmmaker engages with twentieth century Irish history from a contemporary perspective, and reveals that constructions of childhood in Irish children’s fiction are often used to explore aspects of Ireland’s past and present.

"This collection examines how attitudes to children have changed in Ireland over the centuries, and addresses how concepts of childhood in Ireland changed over time."--Goodreads.com.

What constitutes a ‘national literature’ is rarely straightforward, and it is especially complex when discussing writing for young people in an Irish context. Until recently, there was only a slight body of work that could be classified as ‘Irish children’s literature’ (whatever the parameters) in comparison with Ireland’s contribution to adult literature in the twentieth century. This volume looks critically at Irish writing for children from the 1980s to the present, examining the work of many writers and illustrators and engaging with all the major forms and genres. Topics include the gothic, the speculative, picturebooks, poetry, post-colonial discourse, identity and ethnicity, and globalization. Modern Irish children’s literature is also contextualized in relation to Irish mythology and earlier writings, thereby demonstrating the complexity of this fascinating area. The contributors, who are leading experts in their fields, examine a range of texts in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory, and also in relation to writing for adults, thereby inviting a consideration of how well writing for a young audience can compare with writing for an adult one. This groundbreaking work is essential reading for all interested in Irish literature, childhood, and children’s literature.

Despite the immense interest sparked by recent child abuse and orphan vaccination trials, the history of childhood illness in Ireland has remained largely hidden. Spanning two centuries, Growing Pains is the first history of Ireland's unique social, cultural, and political responses to safeguarding childhood health and treating physically, psychologically, and socially vulnerable children. The book also investigates medical management in the home, hospitals, reformatories, industrial schools, and workhouses - places where treatments ranged from the unorthodox to the experimental. Growing Pains provides an account of infectious and non-infectious diseases, such as rickets, smallpox, tuberculosis, Spanish flu, epilepsy, and opthalmia, and it explores community and institutional responses to these illnesses across the centuries, as well as describing the medical pioneers who fought for better treatment and condition for Ireland's children.

Why do we send children to school? Who should take responsibility for children's health and education? Should girls and boys be educated separately or together? These questions provoke much contemporary debate, but also have a longer, often-overlooked history. Mary Hatfield explores these questions and more in this comprehensive cultural history of childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland. Many modern ideas about Irish childhood have their roots in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, when an emerging middle-class took a disproportionate role in shaping the definition of a 'good' childhood, with childhood seen as a fluid concept with a variety of meanings and responsibilities dependent on class, gender, and religious identity. This study deconstructs several key changes in medical care, educational provision, and ideals of parental care. It takes an innovative holistic approach to the middle-class child's social world, by synthesising a broad base of documentary, visual, and material sources, including clothes, books, medical treatises, religious tracts, photographs, illustrations, and autobiographies. It offers invaluable new insights into Irish boarding schools, the material culture of childhood, and the experience of boys and girls in education.

1950s Ireland was the age of De Valera and John Charles McQuaid. It was the age before television, Vatican II, and home central heating. A time when motor cars and public telephones had wind-up handles, when boys wore short trousers and girls wore ribbons, when nuns wore white bonnets and priests wore black hats in church. To the young people of today, the 1950s seem like another age. But for those who played, learned and worked at this time, this era feels like just yesterday. This delightful collection of memories will appeal to all who grew up in 1950s Ireland and will jog memories about all aspects of life as it was.