This collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with ‘infancy’ during the Romantic period. Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.

Explores how emerging ideas of infancy and childhood gave Romantic writers and readers new ways of understanding history and literature.

Nordic Romanticism: Translation, Transmission, Transformation is an edited collection exploring the varied and complex interactions between national romanticisms in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden. The collection considers both the reception and influence of Nordic romanticism in Britain and Germany and also the reciprocal impact of British and German romanticism in the Nordic countries. Taken as a whole, the volume suggests that to fully understand the range of these individual national romanticisms we need to see them not as isolated phenomena but rather as participating, via translation and other modes of reception, in a transnational or regional romanticism configured around the idea of a shared cultural inheritance in ‘the North’.

Contributions by Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Kathleen Kellett, Andrew McInnes, Joyce McPherson, Rebecca Mills, Cristina Rivera, Wendy Rountree, Danielle Russell, Anah-Jayne Samuelson, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Andrew Trevarrow, and Richardine Woodall Home. School. Nature. The spaces children occupy, both physically and imaginatively, are never neutral. Instead, they carry social, cultural, and political histories that impose—or attempt to impose—behavioral expectations. Moreover, the spaces identified with childhood reflect and reveal adult expectations of where children “belong.” The essays in Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children’s Literature explore the multifaceted and dynamic nature of space, as well as the relationship between space and identity in children’s literature. Contributors to the volume address such questions as: What is the nature of that relationship? What happens to the spaces associated with childhood over time? How do children conceptualize and lay claim to their own spaces? The book features essays on popular and lesser-known children’s fiction from North America and Great Britain, including works like The Hate U Give, His Dark Materials, The Giver quartet, and Shadowshaper. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach in their analysis, contributors draw upon varied scholarly areas such as philosophy, race, class, and gender studies, among others. Without reducing the issues to any singular theory or perspective, each piece provides insight into specific treatments of space in specific periods of time, thereby affording scholars a greater appreciation of the diverse spatial patterns in children’s literature.

Cultures of Infancy presents the first systematic analysis of culturally informed developmental pathways, synthesizing evolutionary and cultural psychological perspectives for a broader understanding of human development. In this compelling book, author Heidi Keller utilizes ethnographic reports, as well as quantitative and qualitative analyses, to illustrate how humans resolve universal developmental tasks in particular sociodemographic contexts. These contexts are represented in cultural models, and three distinct models are addressed throughout the text: the model of independence with autonomy as developmental organizer; the model of interdependence with relatedness as the developmental organizer; and the model of autonomous relatedness representing particular mixtures of autonomy and relatedness. The book offers an empirical examination of the first integrative developmental task-relationship formation during the early months of life. Keller shows that early parenting experiences shape the basic foundation of the self within particular models of parenting that are influenced by culturally informed socialization goals. With distinct patterns of results the studies have revealed, Cultures of Infancy will help redefine developmental psychology as part of a culturally informed science based on evolutionary ground work. Scholars interested in a broad perspective on human development and culture will benefit from this pioneering volume.

How and why childhood became so important to such a wide range of Romantic writers has long been one of the central questions of literary historical studies. Ann Wierda Rowland discovers new answers to this question in the rise of a vernacular literary tradition. In the Romantic period the child came fully into its own as the object of increasing social concern and cultural investment; at the same time, modern literary culture consolidated itself along vernacular, national lines. Romanticism and Childhood is the first study to examine the intersections of these historical developments and the first study to demonstrate that a rhetoric of infancy and childhood - the metaphors, images, figures and phrases repeatedly used to represent and conceptualize childhood - enabled Romantic writers to construct a national literary history and culture capable of embracing a wider range of literary forms.

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.