Haunted by Paradise Lost: the Theme of Childhood in Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Writing

Abstract

The sudden emergence of the modern concept of 'childhood' has made critics speak of the 'discovery' of childhood around 1800. Interestingly, the discursive emergence of childhood coincides with a considerable turn in the tradition of melancholy writing as the eighteenth-century discourse on melancholy begins to distance itself from the traditional framework of humoral pathology under the growing in fluence of empirical psychology and the movement of sensibility. The social-political changes and the rise of Enlightenment secularism appear to have had a considerable impact on both the 'invention' of childhood and new tendencies in melancholy writing. Childhood as a discursive formation seems to have been particularly attractive to contemporary writers because it was capable of embedding or relating to manifold other topical discourses. This study undertakes an exemplary evaluation and analysis of four childhood narratives, namely from Goethe's Faust and The Sufferings of Young Werther, Moritz's Anton Reiser (First Part) and Rousseau's Confessions (Book I), in order to elaborate the varied and partly contradictory nature of representations of childhood in eighteenth-century melancholy writings. Aspects treated include the seemingly constitutive combination of childhood and loss, re flections of social and cultural change, and different kinds of memory as ways of approaching childhood.

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