The Gothic in Children's Literature: Haunting the Borders

Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, Roderick McGillis

Routledge, 2008 - Literary Criticism - 254 pages

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.

Contents

• 17641830: 15
• Cyberfiction and the Gothic Novel: 39
• Humour in Childrens: 57

About the author

Anna Jackson is a poet and academic, born in 1967. She received a DPhil from Oxford University and currently teaches English literature at Victoria University of Wellington. She has written several poetry collections including Thicket and I, Clodia, and Other Portraits. She is also the author of Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers' Diaries 1915-1962 and British Juvenile Fiction 1850-1950: The Age of Adolescence written with Charles Ferrall. In 2015 she won the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. This fellowship provides the winner with a three-month residency in Menton, France, and a monetary award of NZ$35,000. Her novella, The Bed-Making Competition (2018), won a 2018 Viva la Novella prize.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Gothic in Children's Literature: Haunting the Borders; Volume 43 of Children's literature and culture
• Editors: Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, Roderick McGillis
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Routledge, 2008
• ISBN: 0415960363, 9780415960366
• Length: 254 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / Children's & Young Adult Literature; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Gothic & Romance; Literary Criticism / Horror & Supernatural