ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that childhood as a major theme and the child as a major narrative figure entered Finnish literature for adults with the realist writers of the 1880s. It also argues that literature in Finland participated in an essential way in the 'birth' of the modern child via an intense dialogue with the rising scientific discourses of the child. The figure of the child appeared soon after the literary field in Finland began to develop. During the 1840s, women novelists writing in Swedish entered Finland's literary scene and began to express their views on girls' education, family life and women in the form of the novel. The child figures in the mid-nineteenth century novels were shaped in a relationship with the discursive formations of religiousness and political science – these child figures were needed to convey and reinforce the nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology of 'domestic happiness'.
