The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary ed. by Adrienne E. Gavin, and: Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood ed. by Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (review)

The ultimate contribution of the scholarship gathered in these two volumes is the offering of new starting points for future research concerned with the British literary child. The introductory essays in both collections—themselves extraordinarily valuable—not only summarize their respective volumes but also establish and point toward new directions in scholarship.

Divided into three parts and arranged chronologically, the deeply historical essays gathered in The Child in British Literature focus on the sociocultural positioning of fictional childhood. These child-in-literature experts admirably discuss the evolution of the preadolescent literary child across a span of more than eight centuries (1200 CE-2010 CE) of British literature. The collection begins with "Medieval and Early Modern Literature," in which scholars persuasively argue for a (re)consideration of the medieval and early modern child. David T. Kline's seminal discussion of the child in medieval literature demonstrates probably the greatest merit of the volume—the promulgation of the potential for new beginnings for future inquiry into literary childhoods. No Western family model has been damaged more than has the medieval one by Philippe Ariès's summation of this period in Centuries of Childhood, that child mortality rates impeded the emotional and personal relationship between parents and children. Kline dispels such notions by addressing topical questions of medieval childhood that arise frequently in the literature. For instance, Pearl, a dream-vision poetic dialogue between the Dreamer (parent) and the Pearl-maiden (a dead infant), "subverts the hierarchy of parent over child and age over youth by making the Pearl-child the teacher and the Dreamer the student" (26). Likewise, references to primers and songbooks routinely surface in romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, thus illustrating a topical engagement with childhood. Mystery plays frequently depict the duress of infants under Herod, while many cycle plays also portray Jesus and Mary as precocious and obedient children. Finally, Kline explains how various conduct and courtesy texts feature a threatened child, and in doing so raise questions about the importance of social and state assistance for children.

The other three essays in this first section carry readers across early modern and Caroline literatures. Katie Knowles considers three Shakespeare plays in order to understand how frequently noble children are subjected to violence. For her, the child characters in Richard III, King John, and Macbeth are victimized by patriarchal rulers striving to establish royal legitimacy. Lucy Munro examines childhoods constructed in the juvenile poetry of Cowley, Fane, and Jordan. She demonstrates how these writers—through the poetry they wrote as children—reveal the cultural context of childhood identities in schools, aristocratic households, and commercial theaters. Edel Lamb addresses children's literature pre-A Little Pretty Pocket-Book in order to deconstruct the education/ amusement binary that many historians of children's literature use to organize the genre. She focuses on multiple conduct manuals, advice books, broadsheets, riddles, and grammar texts integrating instruction and delight, raising important questions "about the ways in which books were read by schoolboys, both in and beyond the schoolroom" and exploring how such books created gendered identities (70).

The essays in "Eighteenth-Century, Romantic, and Victorian Literature" engage the well-known theories of Locke and Rousseau by juxtaposing the divine Romantic child with the victimized Victorian one. Andrew O'Malley explores the "peculiar phenomenon" that makes Robinson Crusoe—a novel primarily concerned with the solitary life of a man on a deserted island—"arguably the most influential and enduring work of fiction in the canon of children's literature" (87). He articulates how Crusoe's "isolation on the island affords an unparalleled opportunity for constructing a new self divorced from the past" (92). The island...