ABSTRACT
The first-person narrator of Sarah Moss’s Night Waking, the novel explored in this chapter, is a historian who works on eighteenth-century constructions of childhood. An example of historiographical metafiction, Night Waking combines a historical plotline with a contemporary strand which abounds with critical reflections on the historiography of childhood. Night Waking establishes an overt dialogue with academic discourses of childhood, particularly constructivist approaches. This chapter illustrates how the narrator’s quasi-Foucauldian commentary on writing her monograph communicates the idea that academics do not capture given truths of childhood but construct it according to the discursive norms of their discipline. While the novel might at first come across as a poststructuralist treatise, this chapter shows that an essentialist notion of childhood soon enters the narrative. When the protagonist finds an infant skeleton in her garden and becomes obsessed with determining its genetic identity, the novel dismisses its former epistemological relativism in favour of a positivist concept of childhood.
