Gothic In Children's Literature

Academic anthology of essays that were presented at the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference in 2017 and 2018.

TOC:

Acknowledgments v
Foreword: The Truth of Horror: A Brief History of the Genre’s
Nonfiction Works … and Why We Need Them (Lisa Morton) 1
Introduction (Michele Brittany and Nicholas Diak) 9

Section One: Horror Writers Who Forged New Ground
“The mist of death is on me”: Ann Radcliffe’s Unexplained Supernatural in Gaston de Blondeville (Elizabeth Bobbitt) 15
Jekyll and Hyde Everywhere: Inconsistency and Disparity in the Real World (Erica McCrystal) 29
ScatterGories: Class Upheaval, Social Chaos and the Horrors of Category Crisis in World War Z (J. Rocky Colavito) 41

Section Two: Spotlighting Horror Authors

Horror Writers Marjorie Bowen and the Third Fury (John C. Tibbetts) 57
“When the cage came up there was something crouched ­a-top of it”: The Haunted Tales of L.T.C. Rolt (Danny Rhodes) 70
Richard Laymon’s Rhetorical Style: Minimalism, Suspense and Negative Space (Gavin F. Hurley) 86
Four Quadrants of Success: The Metalinguistics of Author Protagonists in the Fiction of Stephen King (James Arthur Anderson) 101

Section Three: Exploring Literary Theory in Horror
“The symptoms of possession”: Gender, Power and Trauma in Late 20th Century Horror Novels (Bridget E. Keown) 115
“Not a Bedtime Story”: Investigating Textual Interactions Between the Horror Genre and Children’s Picture Books (Emily Anctil) 128
Synchronic Horror and the Dreaming: A Theory of Aboriginal Australian Horror and Monstrosity (Naomi Simone Borwein) 141
“Gelatinous green immensity”: Weird Fiction and the Grotesque Sublime (Johnny Murray) 164

Section Four: Disease, Viruses and Death in Horror
Night of the Living Dead, or Endgame: Jan Kott, Samuel Beckett and Zombies (Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.) 179
Koji Suzuki’s Ring: A World Literary Perspective (Frazer Lee) 188
Mapping Digital ­Dis-Ease: Representations of Movement and Technology in Jim Sonzero’s Pulse and Stephen King’s Cell (Rahel Sixta Schmitz) 201

Afterword: Guardians of the Damned: Horror Scholarship and the Library (Becky Spratford) 215
About the Contributors 219
Index 223

Gothicism is an artistic literary movement emerged as the darkest form of Dark Romanticism, it draws from darker elements of the human psyche, the evil side of spiritual truth. The term “Gothic” refers to a style of writing that took place in England between about 1750 and about 1820 (Hopkins 01)Poets of the Graveyard School of poetry , gave importance to ruins, graveyards, death, and human mortality, flourished in the mid-eighteenth century and provided a literary context for the Gothic (Smith 04)
Despite the ominous feeling, which this genre sends to the reader, it takes a part in Children Literature. The implied component of the Genre make Children familiar with death, goblins, Dracula and other supernatural elements, in addition to the morals and manners that are put in the novels. Gothic genre produces emotional effects on its readers it chills their blood, delights their superstitious fancies and feeds uncultivated appetites for marvelous and strange events, instead of instructing (Botting 3). To evoke fear and anxiety are two important components that this genre focuses on, it terrifies people in a pleasurable way.
The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling are known to fit the children novels standards. However, the existence of Gothic aspects within the series make them considered as a part of the Gothic genre, and give the reader another perspective on the Harry Potter series. It portrays humans fight with supernatural forces, as Harry fights Voldemort. Rowling puts in her books a touch of the Gothic genre, the fear, anxiety the goblins in Gringotts Bank, supernatural creatures, gothic villain and the gloomy atmosphere.

Removed 8/25/2022. This was published as “Frankenstein and Its Legacy in the Comics.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 23, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2021, pp. 432-40.

Materials produced for distribution at my presentation "Frankenstein and Its Legacy in the Comics," part of a panel on Frankenstein, Comics, Ready Player One commemorating the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and celebrating the college-wide One Book project on Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. Bristol Community College, Fall River, MA. 27 November 2018.

These are my handouts for my presentation. The first file features notes on Frankenstein in comics, and the second includes a comprehensive bibliography of studies related to the topic. Both have been substantially updated.

Please do not reproduce these items without permission.

Children are lightening rods for feelings of dispossession.  As Freud argues in “Family Romances,” there is a ubiquitous fantasy among children that they have been displaced from their “real” parents and cast into a family to whom they don’t belong.  While this fantasy underlies a great number of fictional texts about children, I consider the problem from the opposite perspective: the fantasy the adult has that the child is not his or her own, that it is fake, a changeling, a counterfeit.  Drawing on insights from queer theory, psychoanalysis and philosophy, I analyse “the counterfeit child” in the disparate fields of children’s literature (through J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and his memoir of his mother) and the contemporary horror film, Orphan.  What, I ask, does the counterfeit child do?  How does it skew our official relationship to the vexed category of childhood?  What position does the counterfeit enforce in regard to sentimentality, and how can it help us to think (differently) about current theoretical impasses regarding children and futurity?