new formations no 42

THE RUINS OF CHILDHOOD

Editors: Christine Clegg, Vicky Lebeau, Paul Myerscough

The nature of childhood has been much in the public mind recently. Moral panics continually arise about both child victims and child perpetrators of crime. And alongside the horror stories of the headlines, another kind of media representation of children churns out images which evoke nostalgia for a lost golden age of childhood.

In this special edition, we explore the contradictions in our ideas of childhood. Essays discuss

• child abuse and child crime
  (including an essay from the sister of one of Fred West's victims)
• Nabokov and Lolita
• the relationship between child and adult in psychoanalysis
• the child as material for adult sexual fantasy in literary representation
• representations of children in Victorian culture,
  including Lewis Carrol and John Ruskin
• boundaries between adults and children

Contents and Contributors:

Christine Clegg, Vicky Lebeau, and Paul Myerscough Editorial
Adam Phillips Children Again
Douglas Oliver 'Mongol in the Woods'
Vicky Lebeau Another Child of Violence
Bernard O'Donoghue 'Unknownst to the People'
David Marriott 'The Derived Life of Fiction': Race, Childhood and Culture
Tanya Horeck Let Me Tell You a Story: Writing the Fiction of Childhood in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina
Marian Partington 'Letter to Lucy': 'You Know That Dream We Had Last Night' John Wilkinson from 'Proud Flesh'
Vincent Quinn Fostering the Nation: Patrick Pearse and Pedagogy
Lindsay Smith 'Infantia' Christine Clegg 'No One is Seduced Here': Nabokov's Perverse Family Romances
Bernard O'Donoghue 'Command of English'
Sebastian Mitchell 'But Cast Their Eyes on these Little Wretched Beings': The Innocence and Experience of Children in the Late Eighteenth Century
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald The Necessary Privations of Growing Up

Paperback, 192pp, back issues £14.99 individuals £34.99 institutions
All rights L&W
ISBN: 085315 934 3

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