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Upon the "discovery of childhood," as named by Philippe Ariès, bourgeois culture and modern literature marked out an arcane realm that, while scarcely accessible for adults, acted as a space for projections of the most contradictory kind and diverse ideological purposes: childhood. As this book reveals, from the eighteenth century onwards, the child increasingly came into focus in literature as a mysterious creature. Now the child seems a strange being, constantly unsettling and alienating, although exposed to ongoing territorialization. This is possible because the space of 'childhood' is essentially blank and indefinite. Modernity, therefore, has discovered it as a zone, in the words of Friedrich Schiller of "boundless determinability."
List of contents
9 - 19 Introduction (Davide Giuriato)21 - 37 Idylls of Childhood (Hoffmann-Stifter) (Davide Giuriato)39 - 47 Christmas (Davide Giuriato)49 - 67 Rescuing Children (Stifter) (Davide Giuriato)69 - 100 On the Threshold of Writing (Rilke-Walser-Benjamin) (Davide Giuriato)69 - 100 On the Threshold of Writing (Rilke-Walser-Benjamin) (Davide Giuriato)101 - 111 Becoming-Child (Walser) (Davide Giuriato)115 - 133 Little Hans (Freud-Kafka) (Davide Giuriato)137 - 153 This Briefest Childhood (Kafka) (Davide Giuriato)155 - 176 An Angel's Grace, a Devil's Grin (Davide Giuriato)177 - 211 Notes (Davide Giuriato)213 - 214 Acknowledgments (Davide Giuriato)215 - 232 Bibliography (Davide Giuriato)
About the author
Davide Giuriato ist ordentlicher Professor für Neuere deutsche Literatur an der Universität Zürich. Weitere Publikationen:
Mikrographien. Zu einer Poetologie des Schreibens in Walter Benjamins Kindheitserinnerungen (2006);
»klar und deutlich«. Ästhetik des Kunstlosen im 18./19. Jahrhundert (2015);
Adalbert Stifter-Handbuch (Hg. mit Christian Begemann, 2017).
