Nostalgic panoramas of childhood

In the wake of the Great Exhibition of London in 1851, Irish adults increasingly created mythical and nostalgic panoramas of childhood in idealized forms through the production and procurement of material-semiotic toy objects that offered potentiality. This chapter uncovers and maps sites of childhood nostalgia (real and imaginary) in Ireland from 1851 to 1909 via critical discourse analysis, in Foucault's sense, of toy discourses. It employs critical discourse analysis to describe, interpret, and explain the ways in which dolls and the dollhouse in Ireland from the nineteenth century construct, and were constructed by, a "tangled plurality" of childhood nostalgia. Toys were embedded within specific social practices, reformed festivals, and gift-giving rituals, most notably Christmas. Dolls and the dollhouse are powerful, complex, and emotional sites for nostalgic "visions". They powerfully "touch nostalgic chords" and dynamically imprint the sinuous landscapes of childhood and adulthood as real and fantasy, core self and autobiographical self, subject and object, past, present, and future.