The Precocious Child in Victorian Literature and Culture: Development and Selfhood from Darwin to Freud (2024) (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)
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- Synopsis
- This book examines representations of precocity in Victorian textual culture – canonical literature, children’s 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 Darwin’s “non-progressive model of evolution” troubled the existing model of progression by stages (from childhood inexperience to adult maturity and understanding). Roisín 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.
- Copyright:
- 2024
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9783031413827
- Related ISBNs:
- 9783031413810
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature Switzerland
- Date of Addition:
- 05/06/24
- Copyrighted By:
- The Editor
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- History, Children's Books, Teens, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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