Literature & Literary Studies

Imagining the Irish child

Discourses of childhood in Irish Anglican writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

by Jarlath Killeen

Description

This book examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses on different varieties of the child found in the work of a range of Irish Protestant writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion. The book is structured around a detailed examination of six 'versions' of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the political child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the freakish child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (fiction, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children's bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries.

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Reviews

Ideas about childhood and Ireland were reimagined together in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Childhood began the period understood as thoroughly infected by original sin and defined by natural depravity, but by the close of the eighteenth century had been reconceptualised as a time of freedom, joy and transformation. During and after the bloody 1641 Rebellion, Ireland was represented as an outlandish zone, populated by marauding, child-like monsters. By the 1790s, however, many thinkers had embraced a connection to childhood but reframed it as indicative of Irish energy and potential, and a generator of revolutionary politics. Anglican writers and thinkers were central to these debates and reconsiderations. The Irish Anglican community experienced its own transformation of identity across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and frequently engaged with concepts of childhood and nationality to articulate its changing understanding of its place in Ireland. This is the first book to track the ways in which ideas about Ireland and childhood overlapped and influenced each other in the work of Irish Anglicans across these two centuries of intellectual debate, political change and literary innovation. The book examines five versions of the child: the child of wrath, the vulnerable child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the child as monster, tracing these types across a wide range of genres including fiction, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children's bibles.

Author Biography

Jarlath Killeen is a Professor of Victorian Literature in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin

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Bibliographic Information

  • Publisher Manchester University Press
  • Publication Date February 2023
  • Orginal LanguageEnglish
  • ISBN/Identifier 9781526161970 / 1526161974
  • Publication Country or regionUnited Kingdom
  • FormatPrint PDF
  • Pages296
  • ReadershipGeneral/trade
  • Publish StatusPublished
  • Dimensions234 X 156 mm
  • Biblio NotesDerived from Proprietary 5558
  • Reference Code14449

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