Seeking Childhood

Introduction

This book explores the visual and literary culture of transforming perceptions of children and childhood in France during the long nineteenth century. Charting the developmental period between two moments central to cultural and social understandings of children and childhood, the book’s case studies examine the conceptual and cultural development of children and childhood between the acknowledgement of the child in an Enlightenment context and the avant-garde championing of childhood in the early twentieth century. Recognising this as a crossroads of tradition and modernity, the text demonstrates how artists and writers reflected upon childhood and children as symbolic of both ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, as well as considering the implications for art, society and individual life.