Neil Cocks has a new monograph

Neil Cocks writes:

My most recent monograph has just been published by Palgrave. In this book I think through a problem that all of us working with literature grapple with at some time: the complexities that attend a reading of something in a text that has been overlooked by previous critics. My specific interest is in reading children in nineteenth century literature who do not conform to a standard type. These marginal or peripheral children tend not to be noticed by critics. I argue that addressing them can lead to a radical re-evaluation of the literary works in question.

Here is the Palgrave press release:  

Neil Cocks

The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth Century Literature and its Criticism

Established accounts of the child in nineteenth century literature tend to focus on those who occupy a central position within narratives. The first part of this book is concerned with children who are not as easily recognised or remembered as Alice, Kim or Oliver Twist; the peripheral or neglected children featured in works by Dickens, Brontë, Austen and Rossetti. The return of the overlooked child to these texts acts like ‘a return of the repressed’, overturning accepted narratives concerning their structure and meaning. In the second part of the book, some of the more sceptical accounts of the nineteenth century literary child are challenged. ‘Ethical’ and ‘historicist’ approaches are shown to be resistant to the text-focused analysis offered in the first part of the book, resulting in an investment in a child that is knowable, ‘real’ and non-discursive.