Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood

Judith Plotz explores the normative role that childhood played in Romantic literature. The Romantics claimed the "discovery" of childhood and privileged the child as a model human being essentially connected to nature. To write about childhood, to reconstitute the self as a child, to live one's adult life as if one actually were a child became for many writers a lifelong vocation as well as a refuge. "Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood" describes the obsessive romantic cherishing of childhood above adulthood. Chapters on Wordsworth, Lamb, DeQuincey, and the "Li'le Hartley" Coleridge anatomize four different strategies for making durable literary and psychological use of childhood experience and the child's literary persona.