Imagining the Irish Child: Discourses of Childhood in Irish Anglican Writing of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

(Hardback)

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This book examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It focuses on different varieties of the child found in the work of a range of Irish Protestant writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion.

The book is structured around a detailed examination of six versions of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the political child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the freakish child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (fiction, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and childrens bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries.

Examines a broad range of texts, including well-known canonical texts, such as Gullivers Travels, neglected fiction, such as Stephen Cullens The Haunted Priory, and little studied genres, such as catechisms and childrens bibles

Author Bio

Jarlath Killeen is a Professor of Victorian Literature in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin