The central theme of this book is the changing experience of childhood in nineteenth-century France.

Kind / Fürsorge / Geschichte.

This new volume in the Childhood in the Past series examines a range of sources, methods, and perspectives for developing an understanding of the changing role, status, identity, and health of children around the world during the nineteenth century against a background of increasing globalization and colonialism, drawing on a variety of interdiscip

This invaluable introduction to the history of childhood in both Western and Eastern Europe between c.1700 and 2000 seeks to give a voice to children as well as adults, wherever possible. The work is divided into three parts, covering in turn, childhood in rural village societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in the towns during the Industrial Revolution period (c.1750–1870); and in society generally during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each part has a succinct introduction to a number of key topics, such as conceptions of childhood; infant and child mortality; the material conditions of children; their cultural life; the welfare facilities available to them from charities and the state; and the balance of work and schooling. Combining a chronological with a thematic approach, this book will be of particular interest to students and academics in a number of disciplines, including history, sociology, anthropology, geography, literature and education.

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.