Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel

Sandra Dinter

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English

Routledge
29 August 2022

Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers; Children's literature studies: general

Series: Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present

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 political contexts, Sandra Dinter uncovers both the reasons for the current popularity of such fiction and the theoretical shift that distinguishes it from earlier literary epochs. The book’s central argument is that the contemporary English novel draws on the constructivist paradigm shift that revolutionised the academic study of childhood several decades ago. Contemporary works of fiction, Dinter argues, depart from the notion of childhood as a naturally given phase of life and examine the agents, interests and conflicts involved in its cultural production. Dinter also considers the limits of this new theoretical impetus, observing that authors and scholars alike, even when they claim to conceive of childhood as a construct, do not always give up on the idea of its ‘natural’ core. Accordingly, this book reconstructs how the English novel between the 1980s and the 2010s oscillates between an acknowledgment of constructivism and an endorsement of childhood as the last irrevocable quintessence of humanity. In doing so, it successfully extends the literary and cultural history of childhood to the immediate present.

By: Sandra Dinter
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781032401102
ISBN 10: 1032401109
Series: Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 29 August 2022
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.