The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood confers on 19th-century poetry and culture, this book draws on new formalist and psychoanalytic perspecti