Over approximately the last thirty years, scholars have explored the literary discourse of childhood extensively and probingly. With respect to the Age of Goethe alone, outstanding studies include Dieter Richter's Das fremde Kind (1987), Hans-Heino Ewers's Kindheit als poetische Daseinsform (1989), Friedrich Kittler's Dichter. Mutter. Kind (1991), and Stephan K. Schindler's Das Subjekt als Kind (1994). The edited volume under review is proof that, despite the range and quality of the existing scholarship, this topic is far from exhausted.

One of the pleasures of Kindheit und Literatur is its eclectic breadth. It assembles fifteen essays on a wide variety of authors from antiquity to the pre sent and from a variety of European and North American cultural contexts, with a focus on German-speaking Europe from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Several of the essays (for instance, Martin Jörg Schäfer's essay on “Die Kindheit der Mimesis zwischen Antike, Philantropinismus und Goethes Wanderjahren,” or Nicola Gess's essay “Böse Kinder: Zu einer literarischen und psychologischen Figur um 1900 (Lombroso, Wulffen), 1950 (Golding, March) und 2000 (Hustvedt, Shriver)” cut adeptly across different time periods and languages, revealing both deep continuities and sharp discontinuities in the conception of childhood and adolescence throughout modern literary history. And while a number of other contributions focus on a work by a single author (for instance, Mareike Schildmann's excellent essay on “Poetik der Seelenmechanik. Kinder, Puppen und Automaten in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Nußknacker und Mäusekönig”), the volume invites readers to make their own connections between the different contributions.

Indeed, despite the wide range of works, time periods, and cultural contexts discussed in the collection, one view of childhood in particular stands out, lending a degree of cohesiveness to many of the collection's contributions: the notion, articulated by Davide Giuriato in the introduction to the volume, “dass Kindheit … ein arkanes Reich demarkiert, das den Erwachsenen im Grunde genommen nicht zugänglich ist.” As Giurato goes on to note, this notion of the child as a figure of alterity (Alteritätsfigur) emerges with particular urgency in the eighteenth century. That is to say, if one accepts Philippe Ariès's famous thesis that the modern conception of childhood is an invention of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at the heart of this conception lies childhood's resistance to being theorized.