ABSTRACT
The introduction chronicles the rapid growth in popularity of the contemporary novel about childhood for adult audiences and discusses why England provides a captivating context for the study of this phenomenon. Making reference to the constructivist paradigm in the study of childhood originally initiated by Philippe Ariès in Centuries of Childhood (1960) and which proliferated in the ‘new sociology of childhood’ in the 1990s, the introduction formulates the major claim of this book; it proposes that – parallel with the same movement in scholarship – the post-1980 English novel denaturalises childhood and increasingly conceives of it as a construct. In a second step, the introduction relativises this point, arguing that in criticism and narrative fiction alike, the constructivist approach to childhood often remains a temporary or inconsistent endeavour. Finally, the introduction presents the book’s six case studies: Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988), P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992), Nick Hornby’s About a Boy (1998), Sarah Moss’s Night Waking (2011) and Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (2011).
