Journal papers and articles about feral children

This page lists articles, papers and essays mentioning feral children that have appeared in various journals. Some of the more recent works have only appeared online. Most of the later works are available for you to read online here.

El regreso de las abejas perdidas: los niños salvajes en los limites de la cultura

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by Alonso, Maria Garcia, 2009, Revista de dialectologia y tradiciones populares vol 64, no 1 page 41-59

Feral Children

by LaPointe, Leonard L, 2005-03-01, Journal of Medical Speech - Language Pathology

Le sauvage et le signe

Authors' resumé: Les auteurs, après bien d'autres, re-interrogent l'oeuvre pédagogique entreprise par Jean Itard auprès de l'enfant sauvage de l'Aveyron. L'opportunité qui fut offerte à ce médecin constitue un événement resté unique dans l'histoire des sciences. L'extrême fécondité de ce travail est attestée par ses prolongements toujours en honneur dans divers courants de la psychologie scientifique et de la pédagogie. Il ne s'agit plus maintenant de juger d'un succès ou d'un échec mais d'en reconsidérer les enseignements à la lumière de concepts scientifiques qui n'avaient pas cours il y a plus de deux siècles.

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by Perea, François & Jean Morenon, 2005-01-??, Nervure - Journal de psychiatrie XVII no. 9

Les ensauvagés. Enfants-loups, enfant-mouton, enfants-ours, enfants seuls...

by Strivay, Lucienne Paris, 2004, Communications no 76 page 41-57

Vargbarn

My thanks to Tomas Pettersson for permission to reproduce his essay (this is in Swedish).

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by Pettersson, Tomas, 2003

The Mother Wolf

In the final chapter of his PhD thesis, Williams examines the historical accounts for any evidence that children have ever truly been nurtured by animals.

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by Williams, Paul, 2003

The Familiar Other and Feral Selves: Life at the Human/Animal Boundary

Steeves refers to our perceptions of feral children and Bigfoot to discuss exactly what it is to be human.

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by Steeves, Peter, 2003

Wilde Kinder

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by Schneider, Nadine, 2003, Der Einsame Schütze

CauCau, Newest of the Abandoned Children

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by Candland, Douglas, 2003, FeralChildren.com

Childhood Experience and the Expression of Genetic Potential: What Childhood Neglect Tells Us About Nature and Nurture

Studies of childhood abuse and neglect have important lessons for considerations of nature and nurture.

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by Perry, Dr Bruce D Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, Brain and Mind vol 3 (2002) page 79-100

Nature's Experiments, Society's Closures

The Wild Child, who lives through much of childhood without exposure to language or culture, is exceedingly rare. I examine three of the most famous and most well authenticated cases: Helen Keller, who was isolated from eighteen months until her seventh year; 'Victor', the wild boy of the forest near Aveyron, whom Itard studied; and 'Genie,' who was isolated from language from age two until the middle of her thirteenth year. Attention is paid both to the development of these individuals and to the conduct and misconceptions of those who examined and trained them. Various morals are drawn, which might also have application to research on non-human primates.

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by Leiber, Justin, 2002, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 27:2 (2002) page 325-343

Nurtured by Love or Matured by Nature?

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by du Plessis, Susan, 2002

L'enfant sauvage, Itinéraire d'une figure à travers les témoignages, les discours du mythe, des sciences, de la fiction et de la spéculation

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by Strivay, Lucienne Arras, 2002, Les Cahiers Robinson no 12 page 7-28

Kamala of Midnapore and Arnold Gesell's Wolf Child and Human Child: Reconciling the Extraordinary and the Normal

by Benzaquen, Adriana Silvia, 2001-02-??, History of Psychology vol 4 (1) page 59-78

Savage or Solitary?: The Wild Child and Rousseau's Man of Nature

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by Yousef, Nancy Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, Jounal of the History of Ideas 62:2 (2001) page 245-263

The Jungle of Eden: Kipling, Wolf Boys and the Colonial Imagination

THE IDYLLIC FREEDOM OF THE CHILD OF NATURE was a popular notion in both the Romantic and Victorian periods. But the wild child, or what we might call the child of nature taken to extremes, stirs the imagination in deeper ways. This is the child represented as radically orphaned, existing outside of language, and alienated from human social bonds; yet it establishes bonds with the natural world that mimic human object relations and thus suggests an oceanic dyadic connectedness with the non-human. Linking the idea of wildness with the idea of child, the nineteenth-century adult imagination generates a figure of "danger and desire", to appropriate Wordsworth's evocative phrase, one which represents both impossible connection and irremediable alienation.

by Hotchkiss, Jane Cambridge University Press, 2001, Victorian Literature and Culture (2001) v 29 page 435-449

Bambini selvaggi

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by Piergiacomo Pagano, 2000-09-??, Naturalmente vol 13, nos 3 and 4

O Menino Selvagem

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by Jorge Gonçalves & Maria Alexandra Peixoto, 2000

L'homme descend du songe, Approches anthropologiques de l'enfant sauvage

PhD Thesis, to be published by Gallimard late 2005/2006

by Strivay, Lucienne Liège, 2000, Université de Liège

Who the Wild Things Are: The Feral Child in Fiction

by Gerstein, Mordicai, 1999-11-01, The Horn Book Magazine vol LXXV no 6 page 721-726

Homo ferus: Between Monster and Model

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by Douthwaite, Dr Julia V Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997-05-??, Eighteenth-Century Life vol 21, no 2 page 176-202