Abstract
In the two remaining chapters of this book I will turn from the detailed analysis of the child in individual nineteenth-century literary texts to recent works of criticism that offer what might be considered comparable readings to my own. After all, as was suggested in my Introduction, an anti-essentialist reading of the child is hardly unique. This, for example, is Daniela Caselli’s overview of some of the most significant contributors to the field:
The child has been re-theorized against its classic Piagetian stages of psychological development (Burman, 2007) and as a historically fluctuating concept (Ariès, 1960); it has taken the shape of the adult’s desire (Kincaid, 1992, 1998; Greer, 2003; Bruhm and Hurley, 2004); appeared as a questionable self-evident materiality ‘linked with a primary state of language’ (Rose, 1984: 9; Lesnik-Oberstein, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2004); as a bridge in articulations of national identity (Kiberd, 1996; Castaňeda, 2003; Balagopalan, 2008; Burman, 2008); as central to technologies of visuality (Cartwright, 2008; Lebeau, 2008); as figuring queer (Moon, 1987; Bruhm and Hurley, 2004; Stockton, 2009); and as problematically standing for futurity (Edelman, 2004).1
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Notes
See James Kincaid contribution’s to Brum and Hurley, Curiouser; K. Ohi (2011) ‘Queer Intervals’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 17/2–3, 438–41, 439;
T. Pugh (2011) Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature (New York: Routledge).
See also N. Giffney and M. O’Rourke (2009) The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory (Farnham: Ashgate), p. 237,
and M. Cobb (2006) God Hates Tags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence (New York: New York), p. 213. Lee Edelman himself understands his work to continue Kincaid’s, see Edelman No Future, p. 10.
J. Kincaid (2000) ‘Dickens and the Construction of the Child’ in W. S. Jacobson Dickens and the Children of Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 30–43, p. 30.
See L. Berry (1999) The Child, The State for an alternative account of the child as victim. As discussed above, I understand Berry to offer a particularly subtle account.
This implicates a further position that understands what ‘seems’ and what truly ‘is’. For an alternative reading of the question of ‘vision’ in The Pickwick Papers, see J. Wolfreys (2006) The Old Story, with a Difference: Pickwick’s Vision (Columbus: Ohio State University).
For the persistence of this appeal to the power of the non-linguistic in Dickens criticism, see, for example, J. Bowen (2005) ‘Dickens and the Force of Writing’ in R. Patten and J. Bowen (eds.) Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 255–72.
Jacobson, Wendy S. (ed.) (2000) Dickens and the Children of Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave) p. 30.
J. Kincaid (1998) Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham and London: Duke),
J. Kincaid (1992) Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge).
For a criticism of such narratives, see Burman (2008) Deconstructing Developmental Psychology.
Considering this difference, it is perhaps surprising how often Kincaid’s position has been collapsed into Edelman’s in recent critical assessments. Thus, L. Langbauer (2008) ‘Ethics and Theory: Suffering Children in Dickens, Dostoevsky and Le Guin’, ELH, 75/1, 89–108, suggests that Jacqueline Rose, Lee Edelman, James Kincaid and Carolyn Steedman are engaged in a comparable critique of ‘the ontological inability to apprehend children’ (p. 90). As indicated above, even Edelman reads his own account as a reformulation of Kincaid’s. Certainly, the notion that futurity is a projection of the past is held in common, but, as I argue here, Kincaid invests in a futurity exactly of the type criticised by Edelman. For a reading of the problematic critical tendency to read Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan in terms of ‘partiality and imposition of identity on an underlying “real’ child”, see Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Childhood, Queer Theory’, p. 316. As discussed later, Lesnik-Oberstein’s essay also reads an ironic return of futurity to No Future, complicating further the relationship between the arguments offered by Kincaid and Edelman.
Edelman, No Future, p. 23. For an extended reading of the problem of irony outlined here, see S. Walsh (2008) ‘“Irony? — But Children Don’t Get It, Do They?”: The Idea of Appropriate Language in Narratives for Children’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 28/1, 26–36.
M. L. Cobb (2005) ‘Childlike: Queer Theory and Its Children’, Criticism, 47/1, 119–30; Stockton, Queer Child, p. 13; Bruhm and Hurley, Curiouser, p. xi. For more on Stockton, Bruhm and Hurley and the ‘real’ child, see, again, Lesnik-Oberstein ‘Childhood, Queer Theory’, 319–320.
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© 2014 Neil Cocks
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Cocks, N. (2014). The Queer Child. In: The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth Century Literature and its Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137452450_6
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