Children, Childhood and Irish Society 1500 to the Present

Studies of Irish children's literature are relatively numerous in Ireland, and yet the study of children and childhood, and the concepts associated with these words, is really just beginning in Ireland. Addressing this lacuna, this book is a significant contribution to the field of childhood studies. The book examines how attitudes to children have changed in Ireland over the past half millennium. The contents are informed in part by the emergence of Children's Studies as an area of critical inquiry within interdisciplinary cultural studies. What, if anything, is new about how childhood is currently understood in Ireland? How has the understanding of Irish childhood changed over time? And how do earlier conceptions of Irish childhood feed into and/or inform more recent conceptualizations? Reflecting the interests of historians, literary critics, and the discipline of social work, in an attempt to cross-reference how children and childhood, The book generates considered and important answers to these questions. This collection examines how attitudes to children have changed in Ireland over the centuries, and it addresses how concepts of childhood in Ireland have changed. Contents include: Early Modern Ireland and the History of the Child * The Christian Brothers and the Formation of Youth * Children, Street Trading, and Public Space in Edwardian Ireland * The Role of Parents in the Education of Their Children in Independent Ireland * Dublin: The Reformulation of Youth in the 1960s * Children under the Irish Poor Law, 1850-1920 * The Early Years of the NSPCC in Ireland * Child Welfare Services, 1970-80 * The Irish Fireside Club and the Gaelic League * The Irish Schoolboy Novel * Adult-Child Relationships in Irish-Language Writing * Boyhood in Life-Writing * Jonathan Swift's Childhoods * Irish Revivalism and the Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde * Female Education and Queer Patriarchy in Kate O'Brien's "The Land of Spices" * Family in the Children's Fiction of Patricia Lynch * Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's "The Dancers Dancing" * Mary Robinson and the Irish Literary Childhood * Children in Nationalist Journalism * Irish Cinema and the Child. [Subject: History, Irish Studies, Children's Studies]