...Mollie Kervick [email protected] The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable , by Valente Joseph Backus Margot Gayle . Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 2021 . 305 pages. Copyright © 2022 Hofstra University 2022...

...Cynthia Callahan The concept of the “bad seed,” a child whose negative hereditary traits will unleash chaos on an unsuspecting family, has to this day informed responses to adoption, a relic of William March’s 1954 novel, The Bad Seed , and its 1956 film adaptation. A closer look at other mid...

... of the child, and how this innocence has become a precondition for generating heteronormative models of nation-building and imagined futures. Analyzing the boarding school community in The Chinese Garden , this article examines how the figure of the child is used to confirm the compulsory narrative of nation...

... disavow) a fragile fiction: the coherent adult male ego. It is not surprising that Smith scents both the instability and deep irony beneath these gendered constructions of adulthood, nor that some of her most withering critiques are aimed at dismantling them. Whether the child is cast...

... contribution to Morrison studies because it focuses on the formal properties of Morrison’s works and because it adds to the sparse criticism on the later novels, including the most recent, God Help the Child (2015). In this accessible and precise study, Wyatt’s purpose is threefold: she uses a psychoanalytic...

... that the child has access to a knowledge of innocence that only Wordsworth’s poems will get us back to. Children in Smith’s poems are hardly ever innocent. The “blest” babe of Wordsworth’s Prelude is the “cynical” babe of her poetry: “It was a cynical babe. Not without cause” (Collected Poems 33...

...,” the famous case study of Little Hans, Freud describes a meeting with his former patient thirteen years after the publication of the original case study in 1909. Once a child with a crippling fear of horses, Hans is “now a strapping youth of nineteen” (148) who appears healthy and normal. One “piece...

... is based on difference—the inferior, degraded, “bastard” child that secures the “pure” and original identity of colonial authority and its right to rule. What is useful in Bhabha’s formu­ lation of colonial hybridity is the keen description of the processes of am­ bivalence and disavowal intrinsic...

...” (Nights and Days, 1966). (Although confes­ sionals are usually associated with free verse, Merrill follows an older con­ vention in unlocking his heart through the sonnet.) In the middle sonnet of “The Broken Home,” Merrill as the “child I was” enters his mother’s bedroom with his “satyr-thighed...

... Bish­ op’s first explicit self-portrait, the story “In the Village.” This story, first published in the New Yorker in 1953, describes a return home from the sanitarium by Bishop’s widowed mother. The narrator is a child of five, watching as her grandmother and aunts tend her mother, a mysterious...

... Ideology” 156).5 Petrus already has an established fam- ily with his first wife, his second wife is pregnant, and he plans to take Lucy as a third wife, both for her safety and because she is bearing the child of his “people.” With his Land Affairs grant securing “a hectare and a bit,” Petrus...

... is itself a form of tribute to what he. has attempted to learn from Bishop’s example. §. Telling the story of his upbringing and maturation in A Different Person, Merrill considers characters in terms of what he learned from their man­ ners and style. Central to this story is the “child’s need...

... in the eighteenth-century antiquarian work of Bishop Percy and Robert Burns, among others, formalized in the mid-nineteenth century by the unsurpassed scholarship of Harvard professor Francis Child, and reoriented in the 1930s with recording technology and anthropological approaches to field work. It’s fair...

... eye squint as he lines up his next pass, or his son’s slender arm stiffen as he dreams of one day driving the team himself. The scene provides an ideal opportunity for poetic melancholy. The child, grown up, discovers like the creator of another cold pastoral that he may never enter the world...

..., was pointedly inaccurate: the “grown-up” poet who speaks “In the Waiting Room” invented the riveting photographs that the child Elizabeth sees in “National Geographic, / February, 1918” (Complete Poems 160). Bishop’s photofiction is not news. Already 15 years ago, Brett Millier observed that many...

... that we focus on the central figure. With his back turned to us, the slender boy stands upright on a rug, holding aloft the head of a muscular reptile whose lithe body coils twice around his torso. The fact that the creature clothes the child’s chest and back means that the viewer’s gaze lingers...

... to avoid one. Thus she interprets Humbert’s ironic deployment of confessional tropes as evi- dence of “his attempt to censor or block out our ethical apprehension of the abused child Dolores and tempt us to read her as an exotic, desiring, and desired other” (139). She then in essence extracts from...

... of his sister and grandmother during the long trek of a “population transfer” westward from Silesia. The most enlightening italicized episodes in the book relate to the child’s discovery of an escape hatch through which to emerge from the crushing sense of German guilt by way of the perception...

... the shared theme of a troubled childhood: Bishop’s “Ses- tina” (first entitled “Early Sorrow”) and Merrill’s villanelle “The World and the Child.” Bishop sent a manuscript of the 1956 New Yorker version of the poem to Merrill, and it may have inspired him to write his vil­ lanelle, just...

....” In this movement, desired and radically unsettling, Dove locates both the “I”’s instability and its agency. In “Genetic Expedition,” the speaker’s self-description as a black woman with a white German husband and a child matches that of other poems in Grace Notes and Dove’s biography, tempting us...