The Cultural Construction Of Monstrous Children

Author : Simon Bacon
Publisher : Anthem Press
ISBN 13 : 1785275224
Total Pages : 405 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children written by Simon Bacon and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Markus P.J. Bohlmann
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786494794
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters written by Markus P.J. Bohlmann and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-03-25 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps because of the wisdom received from our Romantic forbears about the purity of the child, depictions of children as monsters have held a tremendous fascination for film audiences for decades. Numerous social factors have influenced the popularity and longevity of the monster-child trope but its appeal is also rooted in the dual concepts of the child-like (innocent, angelic) and the childish (selfish, mischievous). This collection of fresh essays discusses the representation of monstrous children in popular cinema since the 1950s, with a focus on the relationship between monstrosity and "childness," a term whose implications the contributors explore.

Author : Craig Martin
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040107184
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Undead Child in Popular Culture written by Craig Martin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-07 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Emma Reay
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031423712
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Child in Videogames written by Emma Reay and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-10-16 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing across Games Studies, Childhood Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies, this book redirects critical conversations away from questions of whether videogames are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for child-players and towards questions of how videogames produce childhood as a set of social roles and rules in contemporary Western contexts. It does so by cataloguing and critiquing representations of childhood across a corpus of over 500 contemporary videogames. While child-players are frequently the topic of academic debate – particularly within the fields of psychology, behavioural science, and education research - child-characters in videogames are all but invisible. This book's aim is to make these child-characters not only visible, but legible, and to demonstrate that coded kids in virtual worlds can shed light on how and why the boundaries between adults and children are shifting.

Author : Tracey Mollet
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030663140
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Investigating Stranger Things written by Tracey Mollet and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores the narrative, genre, nostalgia and fandoms of the phenomenally successful Netflix original series, Stranger Things. The book brings together scholars in the fields of media, humanities, communications and cultural studies to consider the various ways in which the Duffer Brothers’ show both challenges and confirms pre-conceived notions of cult media. Through its three sections on texts, contexts and receptions, the collection examines all aspects of the series’ presence in popular culture, engaging in debates surrounding cult horror, teen drama, fan practices, and contemporary anxieties in the era of Trump. Its chapters seek to address relatively neglected areas of scholarship in the realm of cult media, such as set design, fashion, and the immersive Secret Cinema Experience. These discussions also serve to demonstrate how cult texts are facilitated by the new age of television, where notions of medium specificity are fundamentally transformed and streaming platforms open up shows to extensive analysis in the now mainstream world of cult entertainment.

Author : Clive Bloom
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030408663
Total Pages : 867 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic written by Clive Bloom and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-02-03 with total page 867 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted. Late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. Gothic—the literature of disturbance and uncertainty—now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations, the terrible secrets of middle class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s onwards that the old gothic castle gave way to the country house drawing room, the dungeon was displaced by the sewers of the city and the villains of early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Grey and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert (1861), the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament and the new Puginesque churches upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, Gothic literature filed these new spaces with a dread that spread like a plague to America, France, Germany and even Russia. From 1830 to 1914, the period covered by this volume, we saw the emergence of the greats of Gothic literature and the supernatural from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Bronte, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. Contributors also examine the fin-de-siècle dreamers of decadence such as Arthur Machen, M P Shiel and Vernon Lee and their obsession with the occult, folklore, spiritualism, revenants, ghostly apparitions and cosmic annihilation. This volume explores the period through the prism of architectural history, urban studies, feminism, 'hauntology' and much more. 'Horror', as Poe teaches us, 'is the soul of the plot'.

Author : Catherine Lester
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350135275
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Horror Films for Children written by Catherine Lester and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children and horror are often thought to be an incompatible meeting of audience and genre, beset by concerns that children will be corrupted or harmed through exposure to horror media. Nowhere is this tension more clear than in horror films for adults, where the demonic child villain is one of the genre's most enduring tropes. However, horror for children is a unique category of contemporary Hollywood cinema in which children are addressed as an audience with specific needs, fears and desires, and where child characters are represented as sympathetic protagonists whose encounters with the horrific lead to cathartic, subversive and productive outcomes. Horror Films for Children examines the history, aesthetics and generic characteristics of children's horror films, and identifies the 'horrific child' as one of the defining features of the genre, where it is as much a staple as it is in adult horror but with vastly different representational, interpretative and affective possibilities. Through analysis of case studies including blockbuster hits (Gremlins), cult favourites (The Monster Squad) and indie darlings (Coraline), Catherine Lester asks, what happens to the horror genre, and the horrific children it represents, when children are the target audience?

Author : J. Allan Mitchell
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452941572
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Becoming Human written by J. Allan Mitchell and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming Human argues that human identity was articulated and extended across a wide range of textual, visual, and artifactual assemblages from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. J. Allan Mitchell shows how the formation of the child expresses a manifold and mutable style of being. To be human is to learn to dwell among a welter of things. A searching and provocative historical inquiry into human becoming, the book presents a set of idiosyncratic essays on embryology and infancy, play and games, and manners, meals, and other messes. While it makes significant contributions to medieval scholarship on the body, family, and material culture, Becoming Human theorizes anew what might be called a medieval ecological imaginary. Mitchell examines a broad array of phenomenal objects—including medical diagrams, toy knights, tableware, conduct texts, dream visions, and scientific instruments—and in the process reanimates distinctly medieval ontologies. In addressing the emergence of the human in the later Middle Ages, Mitchell identifies areas where humanity remains at risk. In illuminating the past, he shines fresh light on our present.

Author : Karen J. Renner
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137599634
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Evil Children in the Popular Imagination written by Karen J. Renner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on narratives with supernatural components, Karen J. Renner argues that the recent proliferation of stories about evil children demonstrates not a declining faith in the innocence of childhood but a desire to preserve its purity. From novels to music videos, photography to video games, the evil child haunts a range of texts and comes in a variety of forms, including changelings, ferals, and monstrous newborns. In this book, Renner illustrates how each subtype offers a different explanation for the problem of the “evil” child and adapts to changing historical circumstances and ideologies.

Author : Diego Compagna
Publisher : Vernon Press
ISBN 13 : 1622738934
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Monsters, Monstrosities, and the Monstrous in Culture and Society written by Diego Compagna and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Existing research on monsters acknowledges the deep impact monsters have especially on Politics, Gender, Life Sciences, Aesthetics and Philosophy. From Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ to Scott Poole’s ‘Monsters in America’, previous studies offer detailed insights about uncanny and immoral monsters. However, our anthology wants to overcome these restrictions by bringing together multidisciplinary authors with very different approaches to monsters and setting up variety and increasing diversification of thought as ‘guiding patterns’. Existing research hints that monsters are embedded in social and scientific exclusionary relationships but very seldom copes with them in detail. Erving Goffman’s doesn’t explicitly talk about monsters in his book ‘Stigma’, but his study is an exceptional case which shows that monsters are stigmatized by society because of their deviations from norms, but they can form groups with fellow monsters and develop techniques for handling their stigma. Our book is to be understood as a complement and a ‘further development’ of previous studies: The essays of our anthology pay attention to mechanisms of inequality and exclusion concerning specific historical and present monsters, based on their research materials within their specific frameworks, in order to ‘create’ engaging, constructive, critical and diverse approaches to monsters, even utopian visions of a future of societies shared by monsters. Our book proposes the usual view, that humans look in a horrified way at monsters, but adds that monsters can look in a critical and even likewise frightened way at the very societies which stigmatize them.