Galia Benziman - Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture [2012][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: November 20, 2011
Contextualizing the popular topos of the neglected child in nineteenth-century Britain within a large variety of texts and discourses, this book isolates a strand in literary history that has not been fully examined yet, and fills a gap in literary criticism. Rereading Romantic poems, Victorian novels and social documents of the period, it challenges the largely-accepted narrative according to which the turn of the century witnessed a clear transition from a Puritan, oppressive approach to children, to a Romantic, liberating one. Narratives of Child Neglect demonstrates that these contradictory trends continued to be a shaping factor of British literature and society way into the late nineteenth century. The book demonstrates the ways in which the oppressive approach managed to survive in the subconscious of the new discourses of childhood and traces a difficulty in representing the child's subjectivity as valuable even in texts written by key figures in the formation of the Romantic cult of childhood such as Rousseau, Blake, Wordsworth, and Dickens.

Reviews
"A thoughtful work on a subject that is as urgent now as it was more than a century ago. Benziman's new conceptualization of ambivalences in educational practices and of neglect of child rights yields unexpected and at times iconoclastic insights into much studied texts." - Professor Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

"Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture is a major intervention in the history of childhood and its representations in nineteenth-century English literature. Benziman offers a fresh, compelling analysis of familiar concepts, skillfully demonstrating the persistence of older Puritan and regulative attitudes toward the literary child within texts by Blake, Wordsworth, Dickens, and others that have long been identified unambiguously with the emerging reformist and liberatory treatment of childhood during the Romantic and Victorian periods. Rigorously argued and closely attentive to historical and intellectual contexts, including social class, Benziman's study opens challenging new perspectives on the topos of the neglected child and the portrayal of child subjectivity in poetry and fiction." - Professor John Jordan, Department of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz

"Addressing the interconnectedness of catechizing and liberating views of childhood from the Romantics to Thomas Hardy, Galia Benziman provides an important contribution to the history of child neglect in nineteenth-century England. Her attention to representations of the child voice in literary texts, combined with readings of canonical and lesser-known philosophers and writers, makes this study essential reading in the field of child studies." - Monica Flegel, Associate Professor, Department of English, Lakehead University, Canada

About the Author
GALIA BENZIMAN is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the Open University of Israel and specializes in British Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century. Formerly a Fulbright and Dan David Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of California Dickens Project, USA, she has published essays in JNT, Women's Studies, Partial Answers, Dickens Quarterly, The Victorian Newsletter, SEL (forthcoming), and other journals.