Manchester University Press
16 Adolescent existence and resistance
Abstract
As the twentieth century ended and the twenty-first began, young adult (YA) television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and The Vampire Diaries (2009–17) featured graveyards as a space for temporary contemplation. With the publication of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (2008), the graveyard came to the foreground as a place of safety and belonging for young people. Since The Graveyard Book, graveyards have become agential sites. Young people live in graveyards or adjacent to them, pets are resurrected, and humans work together with the undead to seek justice for wrongdoings. In each case, graveyards are a chronotope for adolescent liminality – that space and time between childhood and adulthood. Although graveyards appear in many texts for young people, their significance has not been the focus of much academic scholarship beyond attention to Gaiman's novel. In this chapter, I focus my analysis on a selection of texts published between 2017 and 2021 in which graveyards are implicit sites of being: Graveyard Shakes; The Graveyard Riddle; Death and Douglas; The Graveyard Girl and the Boneyard Boy; and Cemetery Boys. Each text features a graveyard or cemetery as a Gothic chronotope, a space the young protagonists occupy to negotiate and fortify their sense of self. These graveyard narratives represent graveyards and adolescence as liminal locale and, as I contend, a space and time for young people to express and develop their being in an ontological exchange with an Other.
Abstract
As the twentieth century ended and the twenty-first began, young adult (YA) television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and The Vampire Diaries (2009–17) featured graveyards as a space for temporary contemplation. With the publication of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (2008), the graveyard came to the foreground as a place of safety and belonging for young people. Since The Graveyard Book, graveyards have become agential sites. Young people live in graveyards or adjacent to them, pets are resurrected, and humans work together with the undead to seek justice for wrongdoings. In each case, graveyards are a chronotope for adolescent liminality – that space and time between childhood and adulthood. Although graveyards appear in many texts for young people, their significance has not been the focus of much academic scholarship beyond attention to Gaiman's novel. In this chapter, I focus my analysis on a selection of texts published between 2017 and 2021 in which graveyards are implicit sites of being: Graveyard Shakes; The Graveyard Riddle; Death and Douglas; The Graveyard Girl and the Boneyard Boy; and Cemetery Boys. Each text features a graveyard or cemetery as a Gothic chronotope, a space the young protagonists occupy to negotiate and fortify their sense of self. These graveyard narratives represent graveyards and adolescence as liminal locale and, as I contend, a space and time for young people to express and develop their being in an ontological exchange with an Other.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures ix
- List of contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xv
- Introduction 1
- 1 The Gothic churchyard in graveyard poetry 18
- 2 Graveyard pleasures 32
- 3 The last days of the urban burial ground 47
- 4 De-Gothicising the Victorian Gothic graveyard 61
- 5 Relics and ruins, photographs and fellowship 77
- 6 The colonial Australian Gothic and the grave 96
- 7 Weirding the Gothic graveyard 111
- 8 Graveyards in Western Gothic cinema 125
- 9 The ventriloquised corpse and the silent dead 140
- 10 Home among the headstones 155
- 11 The graveyard in neo-Edwardian fiction 169
- 12 Unstable coordinates 183
- 13 Conversations with spectres 196
- 14 Monsters of history 208
- 15 Indian burial grounds in American fiction and film 223
- 16 Adolescent existence and resistance 238
- 17 The graveyard level 252
- Coda 268
- Index 279
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures ix
- List of contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xv
- Introduction 1
- 1 The Gothic churchyard in graveyard poetry 18
- 2 Graveyard pleasures 32
- 3 The last days of the urban burial ground 47
- 4 De-Gothicising the Victorian Gothic graveyard 61
- 5 Relics and ruins, photographs and fellowship 77
- 6 The colonial Australian Gothic and the grave 96
- 7 Weirding the Gothic graveyard 111
- 8 Graveyards in Western Gothic cinema 125
- 9 The ventriloquised corpse and the silent dead 140
- 10 Home among the headstones 155
- 11 The graveyard in neo-Edwardian fiction 169
- 12 Unstable coordinates 183
- 13 Conversations with spectres 196
- 14 Monsters of history 208
- 15 Indian burial grounds in American fiction and film 223
- 16 Adolescent existence and resistance 238
- 17 The graveyard level 252
- Coda 268
- Index 279
