Representations of Childhood Death

Description

Recent events such as the massacres in Dunblane and Arkansas, the deaths of children in terrorist attacks, civil wars and famines, children born with AIDS, and the many abductions and murders of children - including some by children - have placed childhood death firmly in the public consciousness. But how do we understand what it means for a child to die? This book examines the way the deaths of children have been dealt with at different times and in different media. Each contributor has focused on a different way of representing the deaths of children - from superstitions about malign child ghosts through mothers' diaries to horror fiction - and more. Front Matter....Pages i-xvi Introduction....Pages 1-10 The Folklore of Infant Deaths: Burials, Ghosts and Changelings....Pages 11-28 Child Death in British and North American Ballads from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries....Pages 29-51 ‘[An] Impe entombed here doth lie’: the Besford Triptych and Child Memorials in Post-Reformation England....Pages 52-64 ‘A heart terrifying Sorrow’: the Deaths of Children in Seventeenth-Century Women’s Manuscript Journals....Pages 65-86 Intimations of Mortality: the Puritan and Evangelical Message to Children....Pages 87-110 ‘Ye careless, thoughtless, worldly parents, tremble while you read this history!’: the Use and Abuse of the Dying Child in the Evangelical Tradition....Pages 111-132 Children’s Death in Dickens: a Chapter in the History of Taste....Pages 133-153 Friedrich Rückert’s Kindertotenlieder....Pages 154-168 Fatal Fantasies: the Death of Children in Victorian and Edwardian Fantasy Writing....Pages 169-188 Dead Rite: Adolescent Horror Fiction and Death....Pages 189-203 Reflexions on Dead Children in the Cinema and Why there are Not More of Them....Pages 204-216 Conclusion, Part I: Death, Sex and God: Sociological and Religious Accounts of the Death of the Young....Pages 217-224 Conclusion, Part II: Grieving Parents, Grieving Children....Pages 225-238 Back Matter....Pages 239-246