Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction and Retrospection, 1820 - 1850 [Hardcover]

This book views Romantic literatures discourses of childhood, education, and reproduction through the eyes of four early nineteenth-century British authors who were uniquely implicated in those discourses. Hartley and Sara Coleridge, children of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and William Godwin Jr, children of William Godwin, shared the predicament of being both real and literary children. All the children of authors who helped shape culturally-definitive Romantic-period ideas about childhood, they wrote back to their fathers in order to understand and to resist the ways in which they were produced by paternal texts which foreclose the possibility of the childs own regeneration. This study proposes that through this predicament, and their responses to it, the literature of the period between the Romantic and the Victorian periods comes into focus, marked by an anxiety not of influence, but of reproduction. It suggests that one reason why this period has tended to disappear from view lies in the sense of historical and aesthetic difference, and productive failure, which this study uncovers.

 

1. Introduction.- 2. The Family, the Child, and the Memorial.- 3. Hartley Coleridge's 'little art of numbers': writing the child.- 4. Sara Coleridge and the 'mother's part': embodying the child.- 5. Mary Shelley's 'beloved acts': performing family feelings.- 6. William Godwin Jr and the 'ties of blood': after the family of feeling.

Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs is remarkably thorough in terms of its scope, making fine differentiations in such a way that each text that Turner considers reveals itself as at once part of a larger tradition and yet uncompromisingly its own distinct object. (D. B. Ruderman, European Romantic Review, Vol. 30 (1), 2019)

Beatrice Turner is Research Facilitator in the Department of English and Creative Writing at University of Roehampton, UK.Thlc