Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siecle (Electronic book text)

This book reads Victorian fin de si cle literature through the medium of perceptions of childhood. It examines the connection between 'monstrous' and idealistic symbolic representations of childhood represented by key cultural discourses of the Victorian fin-de-si cle. Specifically, anxieties about change are linked closely to anxieties about childhood, procreation, and maturation in a range of Children's and Adults' texts from the 1860s to the 1890s. The book demonstrates the ways in which the emergent social movements which have come to define and represent change in the fin-de-si cle period were inherently concerned with the ideas of childhood and parenthood and the ways in which they represented both the promise and the threat of the future.