Manchester University Press
13 Dead and ghostly children in contemporary literature for young people
Abstract
The Gothic has become a dominant mode in children’s and young adult fiction published in the past decade. This chapter considers how Sonya Hartnett’s The Ghost’s Child (2007), Chris Priestley’s Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror (2007), Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008), and Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) all represent dead or ghostly children who, in diverse ways, work to critique or remedy adult actions, particularly through their interactions with history. Contemporary Gothic children’s literature is, this chapter argues, distinctly different from Gothic fictions for adults, which often represent children as the bearers of death. In contrast, Gothic children’s literature displaces the anxieties that ordinarily accompany the representation of child death in realist fiction.
Abstract
The Gothic has become a dominant mode in children’s and young adult fiction published in the past decade. This chapter considers how Sonya Hartnett’s The Ghost’s Child (2007), Chris Priestley’s Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror (2007), Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008), and Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) all represent dead or ghostly children who, in diverse ways, work to critique or remedy adult actions, particularly through their interactions with history. Contemporary Gothic children’s literature is, this chapter argues, distinctly different from Gothic fictions for adults, which often represent children as the bearers of death. In contrast, Gothic children’s literature displaces the anxieties that ordinarily accompany the representation of child death in realist fiction.
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures viii
- List of contributors ix
- Series editor’s preface xiv
- Acknowledgements xvi
- Introduction – the corpse in the closet 1
-
Part I Gothic graveyards and afterlives
- 1 Past, present, and future in the Gothic graveyard 21
- 2 ‘On the very Verge of legitimate Invention’ 34
- 3 Entranced by death 48
-
Part II Gothic revolutions and undead histories
- 4 ‘This dreadful machine’ 63
- 5 Undying histories 76
- 6 Deadly interrogations 88
-
Part III Gothic apocalypses: dead selves/dead civilizations
- 7 The annihilation of self and species 103
- 8 Death cults in Gothic ‘Lost World’ fiction 116
- 9 Dead again 130
-
Part IV Global Gothic dead
- 10 A double dose of death in Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s ‘I fatali’ 145
- 11 Through the opaque veil 157
- 12 Afterdeath and the Bollywood Gothic noir 174
-
Part V Twenty-first-century Gothic and death
- 13 Dead and ghostly children in contemporary literature for young people 191
- 14 Modernity’s fatal addictions 204
- 15 ‘I’m not in that thing you know ... I’m remote. I’m in the cloud’ 218
- Index 233
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures viii
- List of contributors ix
- Series editor’s preface xiv
- Acknowledgements xvi
- Introduction – the corpse in the closet 1
-
Part I Gothic graveyards and afterlives
- 1 Past, present, and future in the Gothic graveyard 21
- 2 ‘On the very Verge of legitimate Invention’ 34
- 3 Entranced by death 48
-
Part II Gothic revolutions and undead histories
- 4 ‘This dreadful machine’ 63
- 5 Undying histories 76
- 6 Deadly interrogations 88
-
Part III Gothic apocalypses: dead selves/dead civilizations
- 7 The annihilation of self and species 103
- 8 Death cults in Gothic ‘Lost World’ fiction 116
- 9 Dead again 130
-
Part IV Global Gothic dead
- 10 A double dose of death in Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s ‘I fatali’ 145
- 11 Through the opaque veil 157
- 12 Afterdeath and the Bollywood Gothic noir 174
-
Part V Twenty-first-century Gothic and death
- 13 Dead and ghostly children in contemporary literature for young people 191
- 14 Modernity’s fatal addictions 204
- 15 ‘I’m not in that thing you know ... I’m remote. I’m in the cloud’ 218
- Index 233
