The Undead Child in Popular Culture

Representations of Childhoods Past, Present, and Preserved

Craig Martin, Debbie Olson, Craig Martin, Debbie Olson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781032657585
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040107188
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• 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 Broomsticks
• 9 Written on the Body: Traumatic Encounters with the Dead Child in Sharp Objects (HBO, 2018)
• 10 “But You’re Just a Girl”: The Haunting Spectre of Childhood in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• 11 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)
• Index