Description: Strange, deformed, and beautiful, the child acrobat Mignon sprang onto the public stage in 1795. A figment of Goethe's fiction, he appeared in countless forms and guises over the next century. The meaning of this compelling creature is the focus of Steedman's account of how 19th-century notions of childhood gave birth to the modern idea of a self.
Brief description: Carolyn Steedman is the author of Landscape for a Good Woman and a Reader in the Centre for Social History at the University of Warwick.
Review Quotes: Strange Dislocations illuminates several intriguing byways of Victorian popular culture. It also casts some provocative light on twentieth-century thinking. Ms. Steedman's most interesting pages discuss how Sigmund Freud (a Victorian, after all) drew on contemporary notions of childhood, littleness, and loss in constructing his view of the unconscious, 'the child at the heart of the theory, ' as well as at the heart of the psychoanalytic body.--Walter Kendrick "New York Times Book Review"