Killing Children in British Fiction

Thatcherism to Brexit

Dominic Dean

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781438499567, 9781438499550
• eBook ISBN: 9781438499574
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Investigates how British fiction and film use dangerous and endangered children to explore conflicts over the future, from the Thatcher to Brexit eras.

This book stems from a simple yet disturbing observation: contemporary British fiction is full of children killing or being killed. Thoughtfully considering novels and films, alongside actual murder cases and moral panics, Dominic Dean develops this insight into a complex account of British cultural history, from the Thatcher to Brexit eras. Killing Children in British Fiction argues that the figure of the child provides means for negotiating, and hence for understanding, recent crises in Britain and their intersections with broader transnational conflicts. The book explores works from major British authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing, Sarah Waters, Alan Hollinghurst, and Peter Ackroyd; emerging writers such as David Szalay and Melissa Harrison; and filmmakers, including Stanley Kubrick, Nicholas Roeg, Robin Hardy, Derek Jarman, and Remi Weekes. Bridging and often challenging existing scholarship in childhood studies, literary studies, psychoanalysis, and critical and queer theory, Dean shows how the child, at once materially present and representative of an insecure future, can provoke relentless fantasies, fears, and, most troublingly, acts of real violence by adults.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Creative Destruction: Brexit and Britain’s Future Past
• Chapter 2 Thatcher’s Demons and Maggie’s Boys: Children and Youth in Thatcherism’s Hinterlands
• Chapter 3 Boy Kings, Queerness, and Radical Nostalgia
• Chapter 4 Abduction and Abuse: Disappearing Children in the 1980s and 1990s
• Chapter 5 Children of Nowhere: Migration and Haunted Futures in Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills
• Chapter 6 Migrant Children and Mobile Youth in Twenty-First Century British Fiction
• Conclusions and Speculations: Reading the Child-as-Future in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover