The Imagined Child

[摘要] This PhD comprises a work of fiction and a dissertation, both of which explore childhood, children and parenthood.The Imagined Child, the novel, closely examines the nature of parenthood, the expectationsinherent in the parent-child relationship, and the responsibilities that society imposes onparents. It explores the strains of guilt and blame that surround all primary relationships:every child is damaged in some way – through nature and nurture. How they deal with thatdamage determines the kinds of adults – and ultimately the kinds of parents – they become.The dissertation approaches childhood as a literary device. It explores the ways in which fournovelists from different historical periods have characterised and thematised childhood. Itpresents 'childhood’ as a social construct and considers the ways in which childhood andparenting have changed in recent, Western history. It then focuses on the research into andliterary representations of children in Africa to explore the versions of childhood inherited byAfrican, and particularly South African, children and how this differs from American orEuropean models.Textual analysis was employed to examine the representation of childhood in four texts:Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), HarperLee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), and Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day (2002).An examination of research and literature shows a very different trajectory for childhood inAfrica than in Europe, and reveals that childhood on the continent has never been consistent,in life or literature. There is, in other words, no universal 'African childhood”.The literary children of South Africa are examined not only to show how differentlychildhood is experienced in diverse segments of society, but also to measure the temperatureof the times.The differing versions of literary childhood, and their varying treatments, provide a gauge forthe zeitgeist in South African society from the 1990s. The dissertation argues that anexamination of literary children provides insight into the development of a new democracy.The dissertation and the novel, taken together, suggest that through the real and imaginedchildren of literature can be gained a sense of ourselves.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand