The child who stops growing, infantile senility, the 'old-fashioned' child, child-wives and child-mothers, the rejuvenated adult - Dickens's writings parade before us a gallery of bizarre hybrids. Dickens and the Grown-up Child focuses on the complicated and unresolved relationship between childhood and adulthood in Dickens's fictional and non-fictional work. In challenging the familiar view that the source of such anomalies lies in Dickens's own childhood experiences, Malcolm Andrews explores the extent to which Dickens was heir to an older cultural debate about primitivism and progressivism, a debate which Dickens adapted to his own preoccupations with the tensions between childhood and maturity. In examining these issues, Malcolm Andrews concentrates on the fiction of Dickens's middle years, particularly David Copperfield, and on some of the journalistic essays.

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MALCOLM ANDREWS

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Book Title: Dickens and the Grown-Up Child
Authors: Malcolm Andrews
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377998
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts Collection, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 1994
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-333-59435-3Published: 01 April 1994
eBook ISBN: 978-0-230-37799-8Published: 06 January 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 214
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, British and Irish Literature

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Table of contents (11 chapters)

Front Matter

Introduction

Introduction

Childhood and Maturity

Front Matter

The Idea of Childhood: A Genealogy

The Savage, the Child and the Caves of Ignorance

‘The Birthplace of his Fancy’

‘Where We Stopped Growing’

The Grown-Up Child

Front Matter

Grown-up Children in the Novels

Christmas and Rejuvenation

Dombey and Son: The New-Fashioned Man and the Old-Fashioned Child

David Copperfield — 1: Children and the Childlike

David Copperfield — 2: The Trials of Maturity

Childhood as Counter-Culture

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About the author

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Authors:

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Other ways to access

Table of contents (11 chapters)

Front Matter

Introduction

Childhood and Maturity

Front Matter

The Grown-Up Child

Front Matter

Back Matter

About this book

Keywords

About the author

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Buy it now

Buying options

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