The nature of childhood has been much in the public mind recently. Moral panics continually arise about both child victims and child perpetrators of crime. And alongside the horror stories of the headlines, another kind of media representation of children churns out images which evoke nostalgia for a lost golden age of childhood. In this special edition, the contradictions in our ideas of childhood are explored. Essays discuss: child abuse and child crime; Nabokov and Lolita; the relationship between child and adult in psychoanalysis; the child as material for adult sexual fantasy in literary representation; representations of children in Victorian culture, including Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin; and boundaries between adults and children.

Table of Contents

Christine Clegg, Vicky Lebeau, and Paul Myerscough Editorial Adam Phillips Children Again Douglas Oliver 'Mongol in the Woods' Vicky Lebeau Another Child of Violence Bernard O'Donoghue 'Unknownst to the People' David Marriott 'The Derived Life of Fiction': Race, Childhood and Culture Tanya Horeck Let Me Tell You a Story: Writing the Fiction of Childhood in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina Marian Partington 'Letter to Lucy': 'You Know That Dream We Had Last Night' John Wilkinson from 'Proud Flesh' Vincent Quinn Fostering the Nation: Patrick Pearse and Pedagogy Lindsay Smith 'Infantia' Christine Clegg 'No One is Seduced Here': Nabokov's Perverse Family Romances Bernard O'Donoghue 'Command of English' Sebastian Mitchell 'But Cast Their Eyes on these Little Wretched Beings': The Innocence and Experience of Children in the Late Eighteenth Century Stephanie Hemelryk Donald The Necessary Privations of Growing Up