Description

This unique and timely collection examines childhood and the child character throughout Stephen King’s works, from his early novels and short stories, through film adaptations, to his most recent publications. King’s use of child characters within the framework of horror (or of horrific childhood) raises questions about adult expectations of children, childhood, the American family, child agency, and the nature of fear and terror for (or by) children. The ways in which King presents, complicates, challenges, or terrorizes children and notions of childhood provide a unique lens through which to examine American culture, including both adult and social anxieties about children and childhood across the decades of King’s works.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Stephen King's Fictional Children
Debbie Olson

1970s

Ch. 1 Degeneration through Violence and Stephen King's Rage
by Karen J. Renner
Ch. 2 “Such a tragedy might have been averted”: Gothic Childhood, American Monstrosity, and the Male Gothic in Stephen King's Carrie
by Sarah Gray
Ch. 3 The Children as Nemesis: a Reading of Stephen King's “The Children of the Corn” and its Adaptations by Debaditya Mukhopadhyay
Ch. 4 Of “Pagan Devil-Children” and Monstrous Plants: Vegetal World, Human Enslavement, and Precarious Existence in “Children of the Corn” by Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad
Ch. 5 The Spectacle of Child-Suffering in Stephen King's The Long Walk
by Joshua Garrison

1980s

Ch. 6 Monstrosity, Ethic of Care, and Moral Agency in Stephen King's Firestarter
by Ingrid E. Castro
Ch. 7 Boys in The Body
by Jennifer Manthei
Ch. 8 “Not if I see you first”: Playspace, Friendship, and Nostalgia in Stand By Me
by Shastri Akella
Ch. 9 “Performing a kind of self-pyschoanalysis”: childhoo

Product details

Published Oct 06 2020
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Extent 352
ISBN 9781793600134
Imprint Lexington Books
Series Children and Youth in Popular Culture
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

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Environment: Staging