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In this study of representations of children and childhood, a global team of authors explores the theme of undeadness as it applies to cultural constructions of the child.
Moving beyond conventional depictions of the undead in popular culture as living dead monsters of horror and mad science that transgress the borders between life and death, rejuvenation, and decay, the authors present undeadness as a broader concept that explores how people, objects, customs, and ideas deemed lost or consigned to the past might endure in the present. The chapters examine nostalgic texts that explore past incarnations of childhood, mementos of childhood, zombie children, spectral children, images and artefacts of deceased children, as well as states of arrested development and the inability or refusal to embrace adulthood. Expanding undeadness beyond the realm of horror and extending its meaning conceptually, while acknowledging its roots in the genre, the book explores attempts at countering the transitory nature of childhoods.
This unique and insightful volume will interest scholars and students working on popular culture and cultural studies, media studies, film and television studies, childhood studies, gender studies, and philosophy.
List of contents
Introduction
1. "Silk is a Child's Skin: Marx, Engels, and the Modern Moloch"
2. "'That canal gees me the creeps': Haunted Bodies of Water and Geographies of Dead Childhood in the Cinema of Lynne Ramsay"
3. "Beyond Zombies: Resurrected Young People and Incongruity in
Les Revenants, The Returned (US) and
Resurrection"4. "White Futures Only: Racialized Undeadness in
The Last of Us"5. "Not Quite Dead: The Function of Ghost Children in William Mumler's Spirit Photography"
6. "Nightmares about Fossils: Spectral Children, Colonial Legacies and Intergenerational Trauma in the Work of Hilary Mantel"
7. "Taken from Life": Lewis Carroll's Photographic Memory and the Cur(s)ing of Sleeping Beauties Sent to Wonderland
8. Fraught and Fragile Domesticity: Visions of the Undead Child(hood) in Walter de la Mare's
Broomstick9. "Written on the Body: Traumatic Encounters with the Dead Child in
Sharp Objects (HBO, 2018)"
10. "But You're Just a Girl": The Haunting Specter of Childhood in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer11. "Undead Child, Undead Parents: 'Honor Crime' and Matricide in Yashar Kemal's
To Crush the Serpent"12. "'They Never Come Back ... as Boys': The Necropolitics of Hitler's Children in Disney's
Pinocchio (1940) and
Education for Death (1943)"
About the author
Craig Martin teaches screen studies in the Department of Film, Games and Animation at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.
Debbie Olson is an associate professor of English at Missouri Valley College, USA.
