Abstract/Summary

This thesis questions how time is defined in an interdisciplinary range of texts, from children’s literature to literary theory, philosophy, postcolonial theory, cognitive psychology and physics in order to think through a series of problems and issues with what time is claimed to be; specifically, time’s connection with children and childhood. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s (1992) arguments from ‘Counterfeit Money’, in Given Time, I read how time is defined according to different perspectives: time in such thinking is therefore always something other than time, including, crucially, being also always claimed necessarily in retrospect. I work with Jacqueline Rose’s (1984) related arguments from The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, concerning claims to know the child always from another perspective, including the child’s relations to time. I also draw on critical psychologist Erica Burman’s Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (1994), and philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962), as these different texts enable me to read the differences in ideas of time while also reading the repetition of differences in retrospect. The implications of such arguments are worked through in relation to texts by the children’s literature theorist Maria Tatar (1999) and historian Ernst Bloch (1999) on myth and folktale; developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1969), physicist Carlo Rovelli (2015; 2018), literary critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar on author Virginia Woolf (2004), author Jhumpa Lahiri (2004), post-colonial theorist Pheng Cheah (2016) and educator Geoffrey Williams (1999). These ideas are analysed in order to think through what is at stake in the claims made about time and the ostensible educational intentions or purpose of children’s literature to which these notions lead. This means that this thesis is not concerned with the achievement of mastery or knowledge and is formulated as a reading in perspective.