Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture, by Ellen Pifer, English, and published by the University Press of Virginia, explores how children and childhood have been depicted by 19th- and 20th-century writers and how these portrayals reflect past and present society.

"In the novels I discuss, children serve as the nexus for investigating literary and cultural issues. In today's society, with violence directed toward children and violence committed by children, such as the Columbine shootings, we have great fear for, and also fear of, the child. This ambivalence is reflected in the images of childhood in recent fiction," Pifer said.

In Demon or Doll, Pifer brings together novelists, critics and cultural historians in her survey and interpretation of children in contemporary literature. These literary children, she writes, were created in "far-flung corners of the world" and "speak to us in a variety of cultural languages...."

The book is designed, she points out, "to spark discussion in the classroom and the café as well as in professional journals" and to "develop an informed appreciation of both contemporary fiction in all its fascinating diversity and–no less fascinating and diverse–our culture's collective values, fantasies and fears."

Pifer begins the book with discussions of Romantic and Victorian literature, including Wordsworth's idealized perception of the child ("trailing clouds of glory") and Dickens' innocents–passive victims of the world around them, who awaken readers to social injustice, cruelty and poverty.

Pifer then discusses the influence of Freud in changing the view of children from asexual innocents to sexual beings, a transformation that was, in turn, reflected in literature.

She devotes two chapters to Henry James, the father of the modern Anglo-American novel, and his fictions, What Maisie Knew and The Turn of the Screw.

James' children were more knowing, more psychologically complex than previous literary children. Pifer writes, "Although James and Freud were both engaged in dismantling this popular view of the child's sexless simplicity, their premises for doing so were as different as their motives." James celebrated a child's "inner resourcefulness and resilience," Pifer writes, as opposed to Freud's more deterministic point of view.

Other chapters deal with Nabokov's "nymphet," Lolita, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child ("a genetic throwback to a prehuman species"), the loss of a kidnapped child in Ian McEwan's The Child in Time and the rediscovery of Wordsworth's child in Don DeLillo's White Noise.

"Novels provide a springboard for asking questions about ourselves, our society and our culture, but they do not formulate answers. By examining children in literature, whether idealized or demonized, we can gain insights into our culture's view of human nature, past and present," Pifer said.

A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Pifer also earned her master's and doctoral degrees in comparative literature there and joined the UD faculty in 1977.

She is the author of Nabokov and the Novel and Saul Bellow Against the Grain, which won the 1990-91 Outstanding Academic Book Award from Choice magazine. She also edited and contributed to Critical Essays on John Fowles. The recipient of National Endowment of the Humanities and Fulbright awards, Pifer is the author of numerous monographs, articles and chapters on contemporary literature.

–Sue Moncure