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N O T E S introduction: constructing childhood, contesting childhood 1. Although the United States has signed the convention, it has not ratified it, as it is perceived (in some circles) to be in conflict with the rights of parents. Also, the state of Texas currently allows child offenders to receive the death penalty. President Barack Obama has promised to address this. 2. See Antze and Lambek; Bal; and Hamilton 9–32 for discussions of cultural memory. 3. For example, the U.K.’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC)— welfare agencies that work with survivors of child abuse—provide annotated lists of autobiographies of childhood on their Web sites. The Web site of an Australian government department, the Department of Education and Community Services, contains references to autobiographies of childhood on its “Addressing Bullying,” “Addressing Child Abuse,” and “Addressing Domestic Violence” sections. 4. Sanders writes that these autobiographies of childhoods were “often shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by a sense of what the subject was to become” (202). 5. The bildungsroman became “the most influential genre of the nineteenth century” and heavily influenced autobiographies of childhood produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. S. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 101–102. 6. See Coe, When the Grass Was Taller; Hooten, Stories of Herself When Young; McCooey , Artful Histories. McCooey argues,“What literary critics usually mean by literary autobiography is a form of writing which demonstrates the aesthetic and technical control that the ‘higher’ forms of literature do,” whereas in fact literary autobiography “can accommodate a whole spectrum of style and technique” (3). Many of the autobiographies I have selected would not be classified as literary autobiography because of their overt didacticism or therapeutic references. Autobiographies authored by writers who have previously published fictional works (for example, Diski, Drewe, and Keneally) would probably be interpreted as literary autobiography. However, the contemporary autobiography of childhood is not dominated by famous authors. 181 7. For McCooey the child is inaccessible through memory and is thus necessarily mythical, part of the adult’s imagination. Though located in history childhood is necessarily “beyond history, since childhood is beyond time” (“Australian Autobiographies ” 132). 8. See especially Adelman et al.; Begley and Moss; Bing; Blais; Gray; Horvitz ; Hughes, “I Have Seen the Past”; Hughes,“Remembering Imagination”; Jones “It’s Better to Tell”; Kirtz; Rust; P. Smith. 9. Alison James, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout discuss the particular type of attention being directed at childhood: “Once childhood was a feature of parental (or maybe just maternal) discourse, the currency of educators and the sole theoretical property of developmental psychology. Now with an intensity perhaps unprecedented, childhood has become popularized, politicized, scrutinized and analysed in a series of interlocking spaces in which the traditional confidence and certainty about childhood and children’s social status are being radically undermined” (3). 10. Roger Neustadter explores “patterns and distinctions that can be discerned in contemporary narratives of childhood” (236). He isolates “heaven,” “hell” and “purgatory ” as recurring motifs in contemporary autobiographies of childhood such as McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Karr’s The Liars’ Club. Though he makes astute and convincing observations about these patterns, Neustadter does not ultimately account for why these patterns might be occurring within contemporary autobiographies of childhood. He questions why certain childhoods are being “remembered” now but does not consider the role cultural memory plays in this remembering, nor does he discuss the ways in which more general cultural constructions of childhood might have an impact on the available spaces for autobiographical representations. chapter 1 — creating childhood: autobiography and cultural memory 1. For further discussion (and debate) on the function and legitimacy of memory in autobiography see Bal vii–xvii; S. Smith and Watson 16–24; and Lambek and Antze xi–xxix. 2. The term “cultural memory,” though distinct, shares a relationship with “collective memory,” “social memory,” “public memory,” and “national memory.” These different conceptualizations of memory are astutely summarized by Paula Hamilton, whose arguments I condense here. Traditionally the predominant modes of public memory have been “official memory” or “historical memory”—authorized discourses that shape the ways a society “remembers” (12). Some examples of official policies governing childhood would include government regulations on health, welfare, and education. The past century, however, has witnessed an increasing recognition of memory as a fluid, social process. The interest of historians in oral history from the 1960s onward...

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