Narratives of Child Neglect : A Romantic and Victorian Culture Galia Benziman Contextualizing the popular topos of the neglected child in nineteenth-century Britain within a large variety of texts and discourses, this book isolates a strand in literary history that has not been fully examined yet, and fills a gap in literary criticism. Rereading Romantic poems, Victorian novels and social documents of the period, it challenges the largely-accepted narrative according to which the turn of the century witnessed a clear transition from a Puritan, oppressive approach to children, to a Romantic, liberating one. Narratives of Child Neglect demonstrates that these contradictory trends continued to be a shaping factor of British literature and society way into the late nineteenth century. The book demonstrates the ways in which the oppressive approach managed to survive in the subconscious of the new discourses of childhood and traces a difficulty in representing the child's subjectivity as valuable even in texts written by key figures in the formation of the Romantic cult of childhood such as Rousseau, Blake, Wordsworth, and Dickens. Galia Benziman is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the Open Univresity of Israel and specializes in British Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century. Formerly a Fulbright and dan David Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of California Dickens Project, USA, she has published essays in JNT, Women's Studies, Partial Answers, Dickens Quarterly, The Victorian Newsletter, SEL (forthcoming) and other journals.