The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children
The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children
Essays on Anomalous Children from 1595 to the Present Day
Edited by
Simon Bacon and Leo Ruickbie
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
© 2020 Simon Bacon and Leo Ruickbie editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940783
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-520-3 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-520-8 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
| List of Illustrations | |
| Acknowledgements | |
| Introduction | |
| Simon Bacon and Leo Ruickbie | |
| Part I | Historical Case Studies |
| Chapter One | The Possession of John Starkie |
| Joyce Froome | |
| Chapter Two | The Naughty Little Children: The Paranormal and Teenagers |
| Renaud Evrard | |
| Chapter Three | I Was a Real Teenage Werewolf: The Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trial of Jean Grenier |
| Leo Ruickbie | |
| Chapter Four | Deviance on Display: The Feral and the Monstrous Child |
| Gerd H. Hövelmann | |
| Part II | Factual Anxiety in Fictional Representations: The Undead Child |
| Chapter Five | Imprints: Forming and Tracing the Malevolent Ghost-Child |
| Jen Baker | |
| Chapter Six | Undead Role Models: Why the Zombie Child Is Irresistible |
| Anthony Adams | |
| Chapter Seven | Children for Ever! Monsters of Eternal Youth and the Reification of Childhood |
| Simon Bacon | |
| Part III | Factual Anxiety in Fictional Representations: The Monstrous Child |
| Chapter Eight | ‘Not a child. Not old. Not a boy. Not a girl’: Representing Childhood in Let the Right One In |
| Allison Moore | |
| Chapter Nine | Perverted Postmodern Pinocchios: Cannibalistic Vegetal-Children as Ecoterrorist Agents of the Maternal Imagination |
| Anna Kérchy | |
| Chapter Ten | From the Monster to the Evil Sinthomosexual Child: Category Mixing, Temporality and Projection in Horror Movies |
| Marc Démont | |
| Part IV | Cultural Categorization in the Past, Present and Possible Future |
| Chapter Eleven | Evil Twins: Changing Perceptions of Twin Children and Witchcraft among Yoruba-Speaking People |
| Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold | |
| Chapter Twelve | Doli Incapax: Examining the Social, Psychological, Biological and Legal Implications of Age-Related Assumptions of Criminal Responsibility |
| Jacquelyn Bent and Theresa Porter | |
| Chapter Thirteen | Black-Eyed Kids and the Child Archetype |
| Brigid Burke | |
| Chapter Fourteen | Indigo Children: Unexpected Consequences of a Process of Pathologization |
| Gerhard Mayer and Anita Brutler | |
| Notes on Contributors | |
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