1st Edition

New Directions in Children's Gothic Debatable Lands

Edited By Anna Jackson Copyright 2017
    208 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    208 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Children’s literature today is dominated by the gothic mode, and it is in children’s gothic fictions that we find the implications of cultural change most radically questioned and explored. This collection of essays looks at what is happening in the children’s Gothic now when traditional monsters have become the heroes, when new monsters have come into play, when globalisation brings Harry Potter into China and yaoguai into the children’s Gothic, and when childhood itself and children’s literature as a genre can no longer be thought of as an uncontested space apart from the debates and power struggles of an adult domain. We look in detail at series such as The Mortal Instruments, Twilight, Chaos Walking, The Power of Five, Skulduggery Pleasant, and Cirque du Freak; at novels about witches and novels about changelings; at the Gothic in China, Japan and Oceania; and at authors including Celia Rees, Frances Hardinge, Alan Garner and Laini Taylor amongst many others. At a time when the energies and anxieties of children’s novels can barely be contained anymore within the genre of children’s literature, spilling over into YA and adult literature, we need to pay attention. Weird things are happening and they matter.

    Contents

     

    Introduction

    1. ‘Do Panic. They’re Coming:’ Remaking the Weird in contemporary children’s fiction
    2. Chloe Buckley

    3. Cuckoo Songs: The Changeling as Hero
    4. Geoffrey Miles

    5. ‘These are troubling, confusing times’: Darren Shan’s Cirque du Freak as Post-9/11 Gothic
    6. Philip Serrato

    7. Figuring the Witch.
    8. David Punter

    9. Ghostly Vestiges of Strange Tales: Horror, History and the Haunted Chinese Child
    10. You Chengcheng

    11. Girls in Lace Dresses: The Intersections of Gothic in Japanese Youth Fiction and Fashion
    12. Emerald L. King and Lucy Fraser

    13. The Gothic in Oceania
    14. Erin Mercer

    15. ‘The Gothic is part of history, just as history is part of the Gothic’: Gothicising History and Historicising the Gothic in Celia Rees' Young Adult Fiction
    16. Catherine Spooner

    17. Adolescent Angels and Demons: The Religious Imagination in Young Adult Gothic Literature
    18. Rebecca Wigginton

    19. ‘Mind to Mind’: The Gothic Loss of Privacy in the Twilight Saga and Chaos Walking Trilogy
    20. Alexandra Valint

    21. ‘THIS HILL IS STILL DANGEROUS’: Alan Garner’s Weirdstone Trilogy – A Hauntology

    Timothy Jones

    Biography

    Anna Jackson is an Associate Professor in English Literature at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.