Sandra Dinter. 2019. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel. Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present. London: Routledge, 222 pp., £ 115.00.

Baudelaire declared in Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863) that “Le génie n’est que l’enfance retrouvée à volonté”. Increasingly, contemporary writers seem to attempt a variant on this feat, if not exactly to aspire to genius then at least to achieve authenticity in their (re)constructions of childlike perceptiveness. Sandra Dinter’s welcome new study might have been titled ‘the construction of’ Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel: its focus is on an analysis of how childhood has been put together and dismantled in recent fiction. The chosen novels are varied in terms of genre, author, and context. However, while it is asserted that they are ‘notable’, the rationale for their particular selection is not dwelt upon at length. This is a common challenge for such approaches and any systematic attempt at a rationale would probably have raised more questions. The novels are not put forward as representative of relevant fiction on childhood but to provide fertile ground for close readings that the author believes do justice to the complexity of the subject matter. All of the works discussed employ different forms of narration and, in part based on their individual narrative structures, engage differently with the idea of childhood as a construct. One intention of the study is to focus on texts beyond the usual suspects in the field and this is largely achieved, though some of the authors certainly are canonical. The opening chapters propose a periodisation and contextualisation somewhere between contemporary and ‘postwar literature’. As a result the contextual discussion is kept relatively firmly on social changes and literary texts from the last four decades with simple acknowledgement made of the well-known touchstones for fiction about childhood before 1980. In socio-political terms, Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel thus assesses the fiction of childhood from the election of Margaret Thatcher onwards, noting that both scholars and writers of contemporary fiction increasingly conceive of childhood as a construct, not a natural and universal phase of human