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Tattoos in crime and detective narratives: Marking and remarking examines representations of the tattoo and tattooing in literature, television and film, from two periods of tattoo renaissance (1851–1914, and around 1955 to the present). The collection reads tattoos and associated scarification, such as branding, as mimetic devices that mark and remark crime and detective narratives in complex ways. The chapters utilise a variety of critical perspectives drawn from posthumanism, spatiality, postcolonialism, embodiment and gender studies to read the tattoo as individual and community bodily narratives. The collection develops its focus from the first tattoo renaissance and considers the rebirth of the tattoo in contemporary culture through literature, children's literature, film and television. This book has a broad appeal and will be of interest to all literature and media scholars and, in particular, those with an interest in crime and detective narratives and skin studies.
’s texts ‘can provide an unusually clear opportunity to understand some of the ways in which meaning is created and shared within a society’ (2009: 2). Gothic children’s literature displaces the anxieties that ordinarily accompany the representation of child death in realist fiction. The fiction examined in this chapter, including Sonya Hartnett’s The Ghost’s Child (2007), Chris
-century Gothic, on the one hand, and children’s literature, on the other. In their introduction to The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders (2008), Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis claim that, at the end of the eighteenth century, ‘the Gothic was soundly suppressed in children’s literature in favour of morally uplifting texts that suited the desires of adults to construct an innocent child that could be trained up into a rational adult of Enlightened values’ (2). Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century children’s writers sought to fashion a
Pasts at play examines nineteenth-century children as active consumers of a variety of British pasts, from the biblical and classical to the medieval and early modern. This interdisciplinary collection bridges different disciplinary approaches to chart shifting markets for historical education between 1750 and 1914: a critical period in the development of children's culture, as children became target consumers for publishers. Boys and girls across the social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously for the purpose of amusement and instruction.
Play provides a dynamic lens through which to explore children’s interaction with the past as a didactic vehicle. Encompassing the past as both subject and site for production and consumption of earlier pasts (historical, mythical or imagined), each contributor reconstructs children’s encounters with different media to uncover the cultural work of individual pasts and exposes the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination.
These ten essays argue that only through exploring the variety of media and different pasts marketed to children can we fully understand the scope of children’s interactions with the past. Sources, from games to guidebooks and puzzles to pageants, represent the range of visual, performative, material and textual cultures analysed here to develop fresh methodologies and new perspectives on children’s culture and the uses of the past.
Bringing together scholars from across a range of disciplines, including Classics, English and History, this volume is for researchers and students interested in the afterlives of the past, the history of education, and child consumerism and interaction.
Deirdre Madden’s twenty-first-century children’s publications recall similar ventures into children’s literature by twentieth-century Irish writers of adult fiction, Edith Œnone Somerville and Elizabeth Bowen. Moreover, Madden’s comic stories include communicating animals, ghosts, and ‘portable property’ like paintings or jewels that call up the
literary and social history and elaborating especially on literature as cultural memory. We trace the central position of orphans in nineteenth-century American literary history as it has been constructed in the twentieth century; orphans have played major roles in a dominant white male tradition in criticism, but also in gendered and ethnic challenges to that tradition. Previous critical discussion of orphans typically focuses on children’s literature, or on nineteenth-century literature, but nevertheless offers useful insights into the historically shifting roles and