Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture
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About this book
The question "What is a child?" is at the heart of the world the Victorians made. Throughout the 19th century there developed an image of the child as a symbol of purity innocence and asexuality. Yet at the same time the child could be a figure of fantasy obsession and suppressed desires as in the case of Lewis Carrolls Alice or James Barries Peter Pan. This image of the child as both pure and strangely erotic is part of the mythology of Victorian culture. Built on a decade of research into literary medical cultural and legal materials "Child-Loving" traces the growth of Victorian - and modern - concepts of the body the child sexuality and the stories we tell about them. The Victorians Kincaid argues viewed children in ways that seem to us now both complex and bizarre. But do we fare better today? While our culture recoils from the horror of child molestation we offer childrens bodies as spectacles in the media giving children an erotic attention we wish to deny. "Child-Loving" writes a additional chapter in the history of the Victorian era.
