ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a close reading of The Child in Time by Ian McEwan, who has written more extensively about childhood than any other English author to date. The Child in Time ties in with several issues raised in the previous chapters: it is a satire about the Thatcherite vision of childhood, and it signals its awareness of the constructivist paradigm by drawing on sources from the field of childhood studies. The first part of the chapter examines the strategies used by the novel to denaturalise childhood. The second part questions this constructivist agenda by suggesting that The Child in Time only uses constructivism to expose the neoliberal concept of childhood as harmful to children. By endorsing the Romantic concept of innocence as childhood’s ‘true’ essence, the novel supplants one essentialist model of childhood with another. The chapter concludes that McEwan’s novel hovers ambivalently between an acknowledgement of a constructivist definition of childhood and the idea of a prediscursive universal child.
