The Land of Lost Content: Children and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

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The Land of Lost Content explores the ways in which nineteenth-century French writers represented childhood and children in their work. Ranging widely through poetry, fiction, autobiographies, and letters, Rosemary Lloyd shows how writers as diverse as Baudelaire and Hector Malot, George Sand and Pierre Loti, Flaubert and Judith Gautier, gradually responded to changing concepts of the self. After a study of the problems and motifs which recur in autobiography, a chronological survey of fictional texts shows the development of a series of myths of childhood, successively debunked by later writers who in turn create their own myths. Rosemary Lloyd goes on to explore such central themes as reading, nature, and school. She examines the evolution of a literature in which the child becomes the main protagonist, and also addresses the question of whether the child figure is merely used as a reductive stereotype. This is the first study of childhood in nineteenth-century France to encompass autobiography, major fiction, and works for children, and to use as its primary focus the narratological difficulties of recreating childhood.