Promotional Information

In this brilliant, wide-ranging study of how writers construct childhood memories, Martens takes us from Wordsworth's cult of the child to the mysteries of recollection in modernist fictions. With lively erudition and exquisite precision, she shows how inventiveness about times past has its own revelatory energy and poetic truth. -- Maria Tatar, Harvard University

About the Author

Lorna Martens is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Virginia.

Reviews

In this brilliant, wide-ranging study of how writers construct childhood memories, Martens takes us from Wordsworth's cult of the child to the mysteries of recollection in modernist fictions. With lively erudition and exquisite precision, she shows how inventiveness about times past has its own revelatory energy and poetic truth. -- Maria Tatar, Harvard University
A compelling study of Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke and Walter Benjamin, and the theme of childhood memory in modernist writing.
-- Marc Farrant * Times Literary Supplement *