Volodarska M. The Concept of the Child in American Romantic literature

The thesis is devoted to the investigation of the concept of the child's literary representation in American Renaissance literature. The texts by N. Hawthorne, S. Warner, H. Beecher Stow, L. M. Alcott, T. B. Aldrich are under analysis. There were two main periods in the concept's formation: the antebellum, which includes mostly adult-oriented works by romanticists (1830-1850), and post-war (1850-1860) crystallization of the concept in children's literature. The dominant characteristics of the first group of the texts are: Christian / Puritan connotation, dialectics of symbolic and realistic representation of the children's images, three main models of the opposition "The Child - the World": humility, aggression/ struggle, preaching. The second group of the texts reflects peculiarities of replacement of the mythogenic tendency in children's literature by introduction of "new children's" images. The concept of the child contains Romantic and Victorian components and the national nucleus, represented by the Puritan component and the mythogenesis of the child's image.