The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children: Essays on Anomalous Children From 1595 to the Present Day

(Hardback)

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The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood.

At the start of the 21st, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ever-present concerns. This innovative and interdisciplinary collection of essays considers examples of monstrous children since the 16th century to the present, spanning real-life and popular culture, to exhibit the manifestation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child as naughty, dangerous, or just plain evil. The book takes an inter- and multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, film, and literature, to study the role of the child and childhood within contemporary Western culture and to see the historic ways in which each discipline intersects and influences the other.

Reviews

Bacon and Ruickbie have assembled a diverse and fascinating bestiary of essays engaging the fear of and for children. With insight and nuance the contributors investigate teenage werewolves (real ones), child zombies, ancient adolescent vampires, phantasmal progenies, evil offspring, and terrifying tykes, among other anomalous children from the Renaissance through the Slenderman era. Each essays offers an insight into the terrors of youth, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, revealing a tapestry of anxiety and dread regarding childhood and adolescence that transcends cultures and historic periods. Reader beware you will never want to babysit again after this book. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Ph.D., Professor, Loyola Marymount University, Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor and author of Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema

Author Bio

Simon Bacon is an independent scholar based in Poznan, Poland. He has written extensively on vampires, monsters and the construction of difference in contemporary culture.

Leo Ruickbie is a writer, editor and social scientist specialising in controversial areas of human belief and experience. He is the author of several books on witchcraft, magic and the supernatural.