These fictions for young people are, I suggest, distinctly different from contemporary Gothic fictions for adults, which often represent children as the bearers of death. The texts that I examine, 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 spectral children who, in diverse ways, work to critique or remedy adult actions. In this chapter, I consider how dead or ghostly children in contemporary Gothic children’s literature interact with history by rewriting past wrongs and restoring order. Gothic children’s literature displaces the anxieties that ordinarily accompany the representation of child death in realist fiction. The Gothic has become a dominant mode in children’s and young adult fiction published in the past decade.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |