The History of Childhood and the Emotional Turn

Abstract

The rapid emergence and consolidation of the history of emotions has already demonstrated the usefulness of the field of study in upending established historical narratives. While a heterodoxy of approaches still dominates the field, until recently, these approaches have been dominantly adult focused. This essay highlights recent work in the history of childhood and youth, questioning that focus and providing a multiplicity of ways to combine the history of childhood and the history of emotions, with a view to both the changing emotional prescriptions and proscriptions of childhood and to children's emotional experiences. I argue that the history of childhood might also influence the study of the history of emotions, adding greater range and depth of analysis as well as asking probing questions of the most important theoretical contributions to that field. To that end, the essay analyses the usefulness of new theoretical tools: ‘emotional formations’ and ‘emotional frontiers’.

Evidence for similar conceptual progress across diverse cultures in children’s understanding of emotion

“…Historians of the emotions have also been understandably reluctant to conclude on the basis of psychological theory that the history of human emotional experience is more or less invariant and, by implication, already written, insofar as the same small set of basic emotions has governed human experience from prehistory onward. Contrary to that timeless stance, historians have argued that analyses of paintings, letters, and archival documents highlight the emergence—and disappearance—of particular emotions or “emotional frontiers,” often tied to practices and moral assumptions about what should, or should not, be felt that no longer hold sway (Olsen, 2017). Accordingly, as might be expected, historians of emotion, including historians of childhood, have welcomed the more constructionist emphasis currently evident in psychological research, given that it lends support to the possibility of cultural and historical shifts in emotional experience (Boddice, 2017).…”

Histories, Memories and Representations of being Young in the First World War

“…Stephanie Olsen has highlighted the need for work which increases knowledge not only of children's emotional experiences but also of how these differ from 'other young people of different ages'. 109 The complex nature of relations between older and younger children are well-illustrated in the wartime cinema which as suggested, was an 'emotional frontier' where agency was less a simplistic juxtaposition of 'adult actions and perspectives against those of children and youth' and more a messy '"In between" of nuanced and negotiated exchanges between and among children'. 110 For the children examined here, the cinema during the First World War was a space of heightened 'emotional encounter' whose excitement and anxieties, entangled in the complex and contradictory interactions of darkness, suggest tensions which complicate understanding of their agency and of their lives in wartime.…”

Crying for Flicka: Boys, Young Men, and Emotion at the Cinema in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s

“…It reflects a scholarly "turn to the personal" and individual subjective experiences in the history of childhood and draws on Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander and Stephanie Olsen in exploring the implications of the cinema's role as an "emotional frontier" between everyday life and the imagination. 8 It also refers to Annette Kuhn's observation of memory work as engaging both the psychic and the social, adapting her analogy that it "bridges the divide between inner and outer world" by evoking the cinema as a permeable border through which sensual and emotional fantasies and feelings were diffused into the imaginative landscapes of young people's everyday lives, where they acquired personal meanings and significance. 9 Girls and young women, boys and young men, were all influenced by the cinema's social and cultural effects and the emotional intensity of films, although historical accounts have tended to focus on the experiences of girls and young women, especially through the prism of love, romantic fantasy and courtship.…”