Children are strange, aren’t they? In every historical moment of the Western world, children have been re-imagined in fascinating ways that reflect the social and cultural fantasies of adults. Plato argued that the sexual love of little boys was the only way to recognize the true Forms of philosophical thought. Lewis Carroll and John Everett Millais were among the many artists who reveled in the prepubescent, naked body. Henry James enraged readers with his portrayals of sexualized children. On the other hand, poets such as William Blake and Charles Lamb described children as the heavenly embodiment of innocence. William Wordsworth believed they were the nexus of creative thinking. The contradiction of the sexual/innocent child in nineteenth-century English literature has spawned numerous Jungian archetypes – including Mary Shelley’s ultimate child-creature and Thomas Hardy’s murderous “Father Time” – that articulate the child as a monstrous hybrid of adult sin and adolescent wonder.

In this general literature course we will consider nineteenth-century English novels, essays, poems, photographs, and paintings that confront the sexual/innocent child archetype in sometimes disconcerting but always intriguing ways. Students will participate in discussions about the texts that refine their critical thinking skills, and will compose ten pages of academic writing to satisfy the University of Washington writing requirement (W).