Childhood, Literature and Science

Jutta Ahlbeck is a sociologist and Senior Researcher at the Department of Culture, History and Philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, Finland Päivi Lappalainen is Professor of Finnish Literature at the University of Turku, Finland Kati Launis is Adjunct Professor of Finnish Literature at the University of Turku, Finland Kirsi Tuohela is Adjunct Professor of Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland

INTRODUCTION: Child Figures as Fragile Subjects

Jutta Ahlbeck, Päivi Lappalainen, Kati Launis and Kirsi Tuohela

PART I: The Ideal and Subversive Child

Päivi Lappalainen: Child Figures in Läsning för barn by Zacharias Topelius

Maria Laakso: The Naughty Child in the Early Twentieth Century: Subversive Child Figures and Humor in Jalmari Finne’s Children’s Literature

Jenniliisa Salminen: Child Adults in Soviet Children’s Literature – Lazar Lagin’s The Old Man Hottabych

PART II: The "Normal" Child

Kati Launis: The Birth of the Modern Child in Finnish Literary Realism

Karin Zetterqvist Nelson: The Changing Construction of the Child Figure in Literature on Child Psychotherapy in Sweden 1945–1975

Shaul Bar-Haim: The Child's "Position": The Concept of Childhood in Interwar Psychoanalysis

PART III: The Sick and Disabled Child

Maria Nikolajeva: Visible, Audible and Sentient: Cognitive-Affective Engagement with Disability in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction

Leticia Fernández-Fontecha: Little Patients: Photography and the Configuration of the Sick Child in Victorian Britain

Karen Lowton: The End of the ‘Experiment’: Positioning Children with Severe Liver Disease as Potential Survivors of Pioneering Liver Transplantation

Sarah Hardstaff: "With special obligations": Constructions of Young Adulthood and Caregiving in The Road to Memphis and Seventeen Against the Dealer

PART IV: The Evil and Victimised Child

Eleanor F W Betts: Victim, Monster, Child or Murderer? Representations of Children Who Killed in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers

Jutta Ahlbeck: The Nervous Child and the Disease of Modernity

Ewa Maciejewska-Mroczek & Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz: Between Monster Child and Innocent Baby: Managing Fear and Hope in Polish Debates on In Vitro Fertilisation

PART V: The Lost Child

Kirsi Tuohela: The Rise of Inner Subjectivity: Childhood in Early Nineteenth-Century Finnish Autobiographies

Roberta Garrett: "A terrible deal for the western parent": Neoliberal Mothering Versus the Teenager

Saara Jäntti: Children and Childhoods in Women’s Madness Narratives

Index