Tomorrow I'm going to be asked to articulate to my advisor my current research interests so we can work on finalizing the list before the meeting in a couple of weeks. This is going to be a challenge, because my interests don't divide neatly into three lists; they divide into four. Theory, autobiography, childhood, and the long 19th Century.
I think my reading so far can be arranged along a scale of constructedness.
1) It begins most fundamentally with child subjectivity - does the child (within the text) have voice or agency?
--The theory in play here is Said and subaltern theory,
--and the texts that seem to fit are Maggie in Mill on the Floss and "Baa Baa Black Sheep": the more heavily autobiographical stories
2) Is the child's voice filtered through an adult recollection? Is it stylized or "finished"? In what ways?
--The theories are of memory, and again autobiography.
--The texts that come to mind are Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or any of the poetry which has been fitted to a prosody.
3) Does the child create, or Is the child re-interpreted through theories of education or psychoanalysis?
-- Psychoanalytic theory would apply, as would historicism and new historicism.
--Texts that fit might include anything by Henry James, who withhold's the child's subjectivity, or Anne Bronte, who writes as an educator.
4) Is the "child" a construct of the figurative space called "childhood" created by theory?
--Rousseau's theories created the space, so he would be relevant as both text and theory.
--Also, Hartley Coleridge fits here, in a blast of cruel irony.
5) Is the "child" a faceless inhabitant of an imaginative narrative structure?
--Narrative theory and mythology cover this level of constructedness, or emptiness.
--These children inhabit fairytales and fables, like Der Struwwelpeter, or George MacDonald, or The Water Babies.
