Representations of Childhood Death

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

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2. Introduction

   • Gillian Avery, Kimberley Reynolds

   Pages 1-10

3. The Folklore of Infant Deaths: Burials, Ghosts and Changelings

   • Jacqueline Simpson

   Pages 11-28

4. Child Death in British and North American Ballads from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries

   • Vic Gammon

   Pages 29-51

5. ‘[An] Impe entombed here doth lie’: the Besford Triptych and Child Memorials in Post-Reformation England

   • Nigel Llewellyn

   Pages 52-64

6. ‘A heart terrifying Sorrow’: the Deaths of Children in Seventeenth-Century Women’s Manuscript Journals

   • Elizabeth Clarke

   Pages 65-86

7. Intimations of Mortality: the Puritan and Evangelical Message to Children

   • Gillian Avery

   Pages 87-110

8. ‘Ye careless, thoughtless, worldly parents, tremble while you read this history!’: the Use and Abuse of the Dying Child in the Evangelical Tradition

   • Elisabeth Jay

   Pages 111-132

9. Children’s Death in Dickens: a Chapter in the History of Taste

   • A. O. J. Cockshut

   Pages 133-153

10. Friedrich Rückert’s Kindertotenlieder

    • Eda Sagarra

    Pages 154-168

11. Fatal Fantasies: the Death of Children in Victorian and Edwardian Fantasy Writing

    • Kimberley Reynolds

    Pages 169-188

12. Dead Rite: Adolescent Horror Fiction and Death

    • Kevin McCarron

    Pages 189-203

13. Reflexions on Dead Children in the Cinema and Why there are Not More of Them

    • John O. Thompson

    Pages 204-216

14. Conclusion, Part I: Death, Sex and God: Sociological and Religious Accounts of the Death of the Young

    • Paul Yates

    Pages 217-224

15. Conclusion, Part II: Grieving Parents, Grieving Children

    • Janet Goodall

    Pages 225-238

16. Back Matter

    Pages 239-246

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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.

• National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, Roehampton Institute, London, UK

  Kimberley Reynolds

Gillian Avery is a historian of children's literature.

Kimberley Reynolds is Reader in Children's Literature and Director of the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature at Roehampton Institute, London.

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