1st Edition

Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel

By Sandra Dinter Copyright 2020
232 Pages
by Routledge

232 Pages
by Routledge

232 Pages
by Routledge

Since the 1980s novels about childhood for adults have been a booming genre within the contemporary British literary market. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel offers the first comprehensive study of this literary trend. Assembling analyses of key works by Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing, P. D. James, Nick Hornby, Sarah Moss and Stephen Kelman and situating them in their cultural and... Read more

Acknowledgements

1 The Rise of the Contemporary Childhood Novel: Introduction

2 Dismantling Constructivisms of Childhood

3 Constructions of Childhood in Late Modern England, 1980s–2010s

4 Approaching Childhood as a Construct: Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987)

5 Radical Constructivism in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988)

6 The Constructed Child as a Counter Model: P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992)

7 Performing Childhood in Nick Hornby’s About a Boy (1998)

8 Historiographical Reflections on Childhood in Sarah Moss’s Night Waking (2011)

9 The Limits of Constructivism in Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (2011)

10 Epilogue

Bibliography

Appendix: A Chronology of Anglophone Childhood Novels since 1979

Biography

Sandra Dinter is Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuermberg in Germany. Her specialisms include contemporary British fiction, constructions of childhood, neo-Victorian studies and representations of space and mobility in nineteenth-century literature. Sandra is co-editor of Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Childhood in Contemporary Britain: Literature, Media and Society (Routledge, 2017). Her work has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Neo-Victorian Studies and Anglia: Journal of English Philology.