The Gothic in Children's Literature: Haunting the Borders (Children's Literature and Culture

by Anna Jackson, Roderick McGillis (Editor), Karen Coats (Editor)

From creepy picture books to Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket , the Spiderwick Chronicles , and countless vampire series for young adult readers, fear has become a dominant mode of entertainment for young readers. The last two decades have seen an enormous growth in the critical study of two very different genres, the Gothic and children’s literature. The Gothic, concerned with the perverse and the forbidden, with adult sexuality and religious or metaphysical doubts and heresies, seems to represent everything that children’s literature, as a genre, was designed to keep out. Indeed, this does seem to be very much the way that children’s literature was marketed in the late eighteenth century, at exactly the same time that the Gothic was really taking off, written by the same women novelists who were responsible for the promotion of a safe and segregated children’s literature. This collection examines the early intersection of the Gothic and children’s literature and the contemporary manifestations of the gothic impulse, revealing that Gothic elements can, in fact, be traced in children’s literature for as long as children have been reading.

Genres: Nonfiction, Gothic, Childrens, Literary Criticism

264 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2007

Reviews

[alekz]

This is a very interresting book, even thoug I can't relate to some of the essays (because I haven't read the stories they are talking about). It's very good to read if you are interrested in gothic literature, children's books and children as readers. The history is really interresting, where it all began and how children has been treated over the centuries.

[Mélanie]

Amazing! This book answered so many questions I've never been able to answer concerning the gothic and the uncanny in children's literature. Definitely worth the read!

[Joni]

The Gothic and the uncanny are still underrepresented in children’s literature. No, let me rephrase that: academic research on the Gothic and Uncanny is still underrepresented in children’s literature as people generally still think in Lockean terms of the child as tabula rasa and an innocense that needs to be preserved for as long as possible (by feeding them sugar and spice and everything nice).
It's silly because the Gothic has been part of children's literature for ages.

This is a collection of essays on the Gothic in children's and (less so) adolescent lit. Some essays, in my humble opinion, focused too much on adolescent literature and that's why I gave it 4 stars rather than 5. The Gothic has been researched in YA lit for a while and when it comes to the function of the Gothic in YA as opposed to children's lit, there are so many differences.

I picked it up for an essay on Neil Gaiman by Caren Coats and one by Julie Cross on humor in children's Gothic fiction but ended up reading everything. It takes you from the history of children's literature as a genre to an analysis of Gothic New Zealand beaches to Gothic comics to Hermoine Granger....

Great read.

[Julian]

This is a collection of essays written about authors who use gothic/horror themes in their stories for children. I was interested primarily in the essay about Niel Gaiman's children's books which often have a strong gothic element in them. I read one or two other essays before I realized that I wasn't really interested in what was being said by the other authors. The essays were sometimes synopses with a highly subjective interpretation, and a thin and, to my mind, annoying Freudian analysis. I decided I had read all I wanted and put the book aside to read other things. This one languished in my current reads for far too long anyway...

[Chrysa]

Very useful and innovative. Contains a great piece on Hermione Granger by June Cummins