
The Land of Lost Content
Children and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century French Literature
Rosemary Lloyd(Author)
Clarendon Press
Published on 18. June 1992
Book
Hardback
286 pages
978-0-19-815173-9 (ISBN)
Description
The Land of Lost Content explores the ways in which nineteenth-century French writers represented childhood and children in their work. Rosemary Lloyd considers poetry, fiction, autobiographies, and letters to trace the ways in which a range of writers gradually responded to changing concepts of the self. After a study of central problems and recurrent motifs encountered in autobiography, a chronological survey of fictional texts shows the development of a series of myths of childhood successively debunked by later writers, who in turn create their own myths. Further chapters explore such central themes as reading, nature, and school, and examine the evolution of a literature in which the child becomes the main protagonist, as well as addressing the question of whether the child figure is merely used as a reductive stereotype. This is the first study of childhood in nineteenth-century France to range from autobiography through major fiction to works for children, and to use as its primary focus the narratological difficulties of recreating childhood.
Reviews / Votes
'Well aware of how deadening a thematic approach can be ... Lloyd ensures that detailed attention to a well-chosen canon of major texts precedes the inevitably looser, but still very useful, discussion of topics, such as gender, food, school and reading. Lloyd is at her best when she provides a framework where we can see afresh the singular merits of Valles's ferocious attack on parent and pedagogue in L'Enfant.'Times Literary Supplement 'interesting study'
Times Higher Education Supplement 'We cannot but be impressed with the range of Lloyd's reading ... Those readers who need an overview of where children appear in nineteenth-century French literature will find Lloyd's study useful.'
Raymond Bach, Colgate University, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 22, Number 1 & 2, Winter, 1993-1994 'Rosemary Lloyd's Land of Lost Content is a sinteresting for the questions it raises and the themes it suggests as for the light it throws on the 'long' eighteenth century.'
Mitzi Myers. University of California, Los Angeles. Eighteenth-century Fiction. 6:3
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Oxford University Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
8 pp plates
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
551 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-815173-9 (9780198151739)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Author
Professor, Department of French and ItalianProfessor, Department of French and Italian, Indiana University
Content
Part 1 Remembering childhood: finding a voice; the sense of a beginning; finding the self. Part 2 Observing childhood: looking down on Romanticism's children; altering the focus; shifting the viewpoint towards realism; changing the horizon. Part 3 Experiencing childhood: "enfant maudit"; apprentice adult; the child as explorer; apprentice revolutionary; the child as puppet master. Part 4 Deciphering childhood: reading; the world; food; school. Part 5 Embodying childhood.