Upon the discovery of childhood as named by Philippe Ariès bourgeois culture and modern
literature marked out an arcane realm that while scarcely accessible for adults acted as a
space for projections of the most contradictory kind and diverse ideological purposes:
childhood. As this book reveals from the eighteenth century onwards the child increasingly
came into focus in literature as a mysterious creature. Now the child seems a strange being
constantly unsettling and alienating although exposed to ongoing territorialization. This is
possible because the space of 'childhood' is essentially blank and indefinite. Modernity
therefore has discovered it as a zone in the words of Friedrich Schiller of boundless
determinability.
