Children and Childhood in Literature: Theory, Narratology, Criticism

该项目的目的是概念化的文学表征的童年在一个关键的文学理论，并分析这种表征与叙事学方法。它试图加强和系统化的理论方法，以类别儿童和童年的学术研究英语文学和超越。该项目基于两个假设：第一，童年和一些密切相关的概念（如未成年，成年，不成熟）是中心的社会结构，在文学中以各种方式协商;第二，童年的文学结构，特别是叙事结构，融入了童年的社会话语，从而对社会现实的构建和个人身份的形成做出了重大贡献。另一个前提是，文化构建的儿童与成人、儿童与父母的二元关系只是区分的相关轴，就像性别、种族或民族和阶级的类别一样，这是文学研究应该承认的事实，特别是因为后者在文学分析和解释中已经有了无可争议的地位。到目前为止，文学研究主要关注儿童时期，主要集中在人物生活早期阶段的文学表现上，忽视了成年人物的一面，他们当然继续成为他们父母的孩子，这在小说中经常被讨论;该项目将在文学童年的理论和分析方法中整合所谓的成年儿童的表现。世纪后半叶，英国出现了大量以童年为题材的小说，这些小说的读者不是年轻人，而是成年人，这表明有必要对文学中的儿童和童年进行系统的学术研究。该项目将从100多部小说的语料库中选择典型文本进行详细分析。

The aim of the project is to both conceptualize literary representations of childhood in terms of a critical literary theory, and to analyse such representations with narratological methods. It attempts to strengthen and systematise the theoretical approach to the categories child and childhood in scholarly investigations of English literature and beyond. The project is based on two hypotheses: first, childhood and some closely related concepts (such as non-age, adulthood, im-maturity) are central social constructions which are negotiated in literature in a variety of ways; second, literary constructions of childhood, and narrative ones in particular, feed into social discourses of childhood and thus contribute significantly to the constructions of social realities and individual identity formation. Another premise is that the culturally constructed binaries of child vs. adult and child vs. parents are just relevant axes of differentiation, just as the categories gender, race or ethnicity and class, a fact that literary studies ought to acknowledge, especially since the latter categories already have their undisputed place in literary analysis and interpretation. Literary scholarship has so far concerned itself with childhood predominantly by focussing on the literary representation of the early phases in the life of characters, neglecting the aspect of adult characters who of course continue being the children of their parents, which is frequently discussed in novels; the project will integrate the representation of what can be called adult children in the theoretical and analytical approach to literary childhoods. The existence of a large number of novels that deal with childhood and are directed not at young readers but at an adult audience in the second half of the 20th century in Britain alone signals a need for a systematic scholarly treatment of children and childhood in literature. The project will select exemplary texts for detailed analysis from a corpus of well over 100 novels.