Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures

Abstract

This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people's agency. 1. The Social Function of Child Cruelty; Monica Flegel and Christopher Parkes -- 2. "This Sport of Tormenting": Cruel Children and their Animals in British Literature, 1750-1800; Heather Ladd -- 3. Innocent Cruelty and the Love of Beauty in Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales; Monica Flegel -- 4. Anne is Angry: Female Beauty and the Transformative Power of Cruelty in L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables; Christopher Parkes -- 5. Old-School Bullies at Hogwarts: The Pre-Victorian Roots of J.K. Rowling's Depiction of Child-on-child Violence; Katharine Kittredge and Carolyn Rennie -- 6. Bullies, the Bullied and Bullying Narratives in Contemporary Fiction; Clare Bradford and Lara Hedberg -- 7. Murderous Misfits and Misguided Mentors in Rohan O'Grady's Let's Kill Uncle; Rebecca Brown -- 8. Exceptional and Destructive: The Dangerous Child and the Atom Bomb in Postwar Science Fiction; Kristen Gregory -- 9. "Tag ... You're It": Cold War Comics and the Performance of Boyhood and Criminality; Hans Staats -- 10. "Child Psychopath" Films of the 1980s and 1990s; Karen J. Renner -- 11. A "Voodoo Doll in Diapers": Deconstructing the Cruel Child in Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003); Sandra Dinter -- 12. "I Want to Die as Myself": Young Adult Dystopias, Cruelty, and Resistance; Carrie Hintz -- 13. Kindness in a Cruel World: The Formation of Agentic Non-Heteronormative Identity in Contemporary YA Fictions; Victorian Flanagan -- 14. Camping the Killer Child: The Queer Humor of William March's The Bad Seed on Page, Stage, and Screen; Tison Pugh.