Introduction: The infantilization of British literary culture

Religion, education and the post-secular child

“…This essay began with an ironic gesture towards the cluster of Romantic myths within which childhood is customarily seen to be possessed of a radiance or penumbra attached to objects trapped immemorially in the nexus of community and power (Rowland, 2012). There are inflections of this heritage that accord children just those extraordinary and preternatural properties that can be found in the exotic narratives of fairy story and folk tale which are such a prominent aspect of the vernacular or even subversively 'unofficial' formation of childhood across the generations.…”