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Isaac Watts and the Dimensions of Child Interiority
Author(s) -
WakelyMulroney Katherine
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12295
Subject(s) - object (grammar) , lying , psychology , sociology , psychoanalysis , social psychology , philosophy , medicine , linguistics , radiology
The pedagogy of Isaac Watts, a self‐styled devotee of Locke, is defined by a preoccupation with the dimensions and relative accessibility of human interiority. His instructional texts for children and adults centre on the transmission of information between the reader's interiorised self and the external world. While Watts's texts for adults stress the voluntary nature of this transmission, his texts for children suggest that the conduit between interior and exterior may be wilfully obstructed. Using the figure of the lying child, I explore the possibility that child interiority was, for Watts, an object of fear.