Horrifying Children
Hauntology and the Legacy of Children’s Television
Professor or Dr Robert Edgar editor Dr John Marland editor Lauren Stephenson editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:4th Apr '24
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A detailed and innovative book which examines weird, eerie and horrifying children’s television and literature via critical analysis, memoir and autoethnography.
Horrifying Children examines weird and eerie children’s television and literature via critical analysis, memoir and autoethnography. There has been an explosion of interest in the impact of children’s television and literature of the late twentieth century. In particular, the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s are seen as decades that shaped a great deal of the contemporary cultural landscape. Television of this period dominated the world of childhood entertainment, drawing freely upon literature and popular culture, like the Garbage Pail Kids and Stranger Things, and much of it continues to resonate powerfully with the generation of cultural producers (fiction writers, screenwriters, directors, musicians and artists) that grew up watching the weird, the eerie and the horrific: the essence of 21st-century Hauntology. In these terms this book is not about children’s television as it exists now, but rather as it features as a facet of memory in the 21st century. As such it is the legacy of these television programmes that is at the core of Horrifying Children. The ‘haunting’ of adults by what we have seen on the screen is crucial to the study. This collection directly addresses that which ‘scared us’ in the past insomuch as there is a correlation between individual and collective cultural memory, with some chapters providing an opportunity for situating existing explorations and understandings of Gothic and Horror TV within a hauntological and experiential framework.
Horrifying Children presents a fascinating and multifaceted analysis of five decades of gothic and supernatural British children’s television shows and discusses the hauntological effects of these shows in (re)presenting the pre-War nostalgia and Post-war anxieties of British culture. We learn how the liminal figure of the child within the original 60’s and 70’s television series “haunted” subsequent generations of children in the 80s, 90s and 00s when the series were re-broadcasted. Addressing specifically how mysterious, spooky and ghostly children’s television effects the collective cultural memory of adults, Horrifying Children enriches our understanding of the deep impact of the figure of the child in visual narrative for each generation that observes it. * Andre Seewood, Associate Instructor, Indiana University-Bloomington, USA *
This wide-ranging collection, taking us on a hauntological journey back to and through historical children’s television, is impressive in its breadth and depth. It offers the reader a thorough exploration of why children’s television has stayed with us, clinging to the dark recesses of our minds, remembered as an unsettling set of uncanny sounds and spectral images. What I particularly love about these essays in this book are the ways that the authors negotiate and examine their own mnemonic relationship to such a wide variety of programming. Scholars often reflect on how television makes meaning from a position of critical disengagement or detachment: this book shows that it is possible to write with clarity and critical insight while examining your own affective responses to programmes known of old and long familiar. * Helen Wheatley, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick, UK *
ISBN: 9781501390562
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
272 pages