Abstract
Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein each test, in different ways, the limits of innocence, shelter, and nostalgia represented in the discourses of childhood interiority circulating in the modern era. In this chapter, I introduce readers to three such discourses including the Biblical child set in the midst, the child in the house, and a nostalgia for childhood. To each of these, I argue that modernist literature sets out to create explicit counter discourses in which the child in the midst may not be able to save herself let alone anyone else; the child in the house is a white child; and nostalgia is an illness whose cure requires a remove, not a return to childhood.
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Notes
- 1.
Freud’s theoretical assertions linking the unconscious to childhood were in fact highly indebted to German Romanticism. See George Makari’s chapter “City of Mirrors, City of Dreams” in his Revolution in Mind.
- 2.
Carol Gilligan, in her groundbreaking study In a Different Voice, argued that, beginning with Freud, developmental psychology throughout most of the twentieth century widely equated normative child development with male development.
- 3.
James J. Heckman coined the phrase “noncognitive skills” to describe these attributes of success. See “The Importance of Noncognitive Skills: Lessons from the GED Testing Program.”
- 4.
See Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, Richardson, “Romanticism and the End of Childhood,” and Knoepflmacher, Ventures into Childland.
- 5.
The “inner child” movement, which focuses therapeutic practice on righting the wrongs suffered in childhood as the singularly most important path to healing, was arguably most clearly articulated by Charles Whitfield and John Bradshaw in the second half of the twentieth century.
- 6.
Unless otherwise specified, quotations of Hughes’s poems come from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and published by Random House.
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Phillips, M. (2016). American Modernism, Childhood, and the Inward Turn. In: Representations of Childhood in American Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50807-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50807-2_2
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