Abstract
This collection offers a range of innovative methodological and disciplinary approaches to the intersection of literary cultures with children and childhoods across the twentieth century. The volume engages with two crucial acts of re-centering: not only focusing on the multiplicity of childhoods, but also centering the agency of children, including foregrounding the representation of child voices and subjectivities within texts. Chapters explore such themes as challenges to received notions of childhood and the role of child-oriented texts in larger cultural and political projects. Another intent of the volume is to explore literary culture not only as a body of materials produced by adults for consumption by children but also as co-created by young people through their actions as speakers, artists, readers, and writers.
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Notes
- 1.
Sarada Balagopalan offers an important critique of current discourse on plural childhoods, arguing that the “distancing” of the lives of children outside European American contexts serves to, problematically, “continually reinforce … the higher truth of an universal, linear, and singular narrative of childhood” (24).
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Conrad, R., Kennedy, L.B. (2020). Introduction: Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods. In: Conrad, R., Kennedy, L.B. (eds) Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_1
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