1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910782580203321

Autore

Woods Robert

Titolo

Children remembered : responses to untimely death in the past / / Robert Woods [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Liverpool : , : Liverpool University Press, , 2006

ISBN

1-78138-048-1

1-84631-282-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xii, 288 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Disciplina

155.937085

Soggetti

Infants - Death - Psychological aspects

Infants - Death - Religious aspects

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 07 Jul 2017).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: 'the lines of life' -- Après la mort des enfants -- Mortality, childcare and mourning -- Children in pictures and monuments -- Emotions and literature -- Poems, mainly of child loss -- The vocabulary of grief -- Parallel histories: experience and expression.

Sommario/riassunto

Children Remembered discusses the relationship between parents and children in the past. It focuses on the ways in which adults responded to the untimely deaths of children, whether and how they expressed their grief. The study engages with the hypothesis of 'parental indifference' associated with the French cultural historian Philippe Ariès by analysing the changing risk of mortality since the sixteenth century and assessing its consequences. It uses paintings and poems to describe feelings and emotions in ways that are not only highly original, but also challenge traditional disciplinary conventions. The circumstances of infant and child mortality are considered for France and England, while example portraits and poems are selected from England and America. While the work is firmly grounded in demography, it is especially concerned with current debates in social and cultural history, with the history of childhood, the way pictorial images can be 'read', and the use as historical evidence to which literature may be put. This is a wide- ranging and ambitions multi-disciplinary study that will add significantly to our understanding of



demographic structures; the ways in which they have conditioned attitudes and behaviour in the past.