Creating Childhood Dublin City University - Full Curriculum Program Spring 2022 Semester - Dublin

This course looks at the development of children’s literature from the mid nineteenth century until the present, exploring what it reveals about shifting ideas of the child and childhood during the period under discussion. The first part of the course begins with an examination of how Romantic constructions of childhood influenced early and mid-Victorian writers for children, and moves then to a consideration of the factors that informed the increasing idealization of the child in the children’s literature of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The second part of the course introduces students to more recent works for children and young adults, exploring how these draw upon and/or subvert the models of childhood/adolescence that have gone before.