Bloody Murder

The Homicide Tradition in Children's Literature

Michelle Ann Abate

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781421408415
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

"Off with her head!" decreed the Queen of Hearts, one of a multitude of murderous villains populating the pages of children's literature explored in this volume.

Given the long-standing belief that children ought to be shielded from disturbing life events, it is surprising to see how many stories for kids involve killing. Bloody Murder is the first full-length critical study of this pervasive theme of murder in children's literature. Through rereadings of well-known works, such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, and The Outsiders, Michelle Ann Abate explores how acts of homicide connect these works with an array of previously unforeseen literary, social, political, and cultural issues. Topics range from changes in the America criminal justice system, the rise of forensic science, and shifting attitudes about crime and punishment to changing cultural conceptions about the nature of evil and the different ways that murder has been popularly presented and socially interpreted.

Bloody Murder adds to the body of inquiry into America's ongoing fascination with violent crime. Abate argues that when narratives for children are considered along with other representations of homicide in the United States, they not only provide a more accurate portrait of the range, depth, and variety of crime literature, they also alter existing ideas about the meaning of violence, the emotional appeal of fear, and the cultural construction of death and dying.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Once upon a Crime: Homicide in American Culture and Popular Children’s Literature from “Bluebeard” to Harry Potter
• 1 “You Must Kill Her and Bring Me Her Lungs and Liver as Proof”: “Snow White” and the Fact as well as Fantasy of Filicide
• 2 “The Queen Had Only One Way of Settling All Difficulties … ‘Off with His Head!’”: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Antigallows Movement
• 3 “Swarthy, Sun-Tanned, Villainous Looking Fellows”: Tarzan of the Apes and Criminal Anthropology
• 4 “A Sixth Sense Seemed to Tell Her That She Had Encountered Something Unusual”: Psychic Sleuthing in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories
• 5 “How’d You Like That Haircut to Begin Just Below the Chin?”: Juvenile Delinquency, Teenage Killers, and a Pulp Aesthetic in The Outsiders
• 6 “My Job Is … to Make You a Human Being in the Eyes of the Jury”: Confronting the Demonization—and Dramatization—of Murder in Walter Dean Myers’s Monster
• Epilogue. “Just Because You Don’t Have a Pulse Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Be Perky”: My So-Called Death, Young Adult Zombie Fiction, and Murder in the Posthuman Age
• Works Cited
• Index