Nora Maguire is Assistant Professor in Germanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She completed her PhD in 2011.

«Maguire is very much in control of her subject and provides a fresh and stimulating reading of post-Wende texts which have received substantial scholarly attention. She challenges critics’ often peripheral or broad-brush readings of the function of childhood through a robust, focussed, and detailed analysis. The monograph will be a welcome addition to the rapidly expanding field of childhood studies, and most particularly to explorations of childhood and child figures in German-language literature. Indeed, ‘childness’ may well come to be adopted more widely as a productive critical framework. This study makes a first-rate opening to Peter Lang’s new series ‘Studies in Modern German and Austrian Literature’.» (Alexandra Lloyd, Germanistik in Ireland, 2014)

• Contents: Childness and the discursive landscapes of the ‘new’ Federal Republic – The tabula rasa and the innocent eye in Dieter Forte’s Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen – Childness and the ‘New Right’: Martin Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen – The violence of innocence in Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde – ‘Enchanted hunters’: Paedophilic motifs in the work of W.G. Sebald – Innocence, death and Sebald’s structures of mourning – Intimations of mortality: Childhood memory and the child’s perspective in Sebald’s ‘Il ritorno in patria’, ‘Max Aurach’ and Austerlitz – The dream of wholeness: Childness, memory and subjectivity in Austerlitz – Childness and the poetics of persuasion.