From the Romantic Child to the Postmodern Child: Reconstruction of Childhood in Ian McEwan’s The Daydreamer

Scholarship in children’s literature associates the rise of the genre with the development of the modern concept of childhood, and this connection makes it impossible to study children’s literature at any historical moment without considering and critically examining the prevailing image of the child. Literary representations of children have long centered on a single stereotype–the Romantic child–whose ideological foundations were laid in the Enlightenment, deepened in the Romantic period, and ultimately solidified within literary tradition. Nevertheless, this long-established figure–an emblem of idyll and essential innocence–can no longer offer an authentic account of childhood in a postmodern world characterized not only by uncertainty, instability, and fluidity but also by pervasive violence and abuse embedded in social structures, ranging from the most intimate family units to the mass media that children consume. This paper explores the consequent shift from the Romantic child to the postmodern child and analyzes Ian McEwan’s The Daydreamer (1994) to demonstrate how a new conception of childhood is reconstructed through the portrayal of a psychologically complex, profoundly ambiguous, and largely rebellious child protagonist, who innately uses daydreaming as a mode of liberation and a catalyst for self-directed awareness.