The Gothic in Children's Literature

From creepy picture books to Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, the Spiderwick Chronicles, and countless vampire series for young adult readers, fear has become a dominant mode of entertainment for young readers. The last two decades have seen an enormous growth in the critical study of two very different genres, the Gothic and childrens literature. The Gothic, concerned with the perverse and the forbidden, with adult sexuality and religious or metaphysical doubts and heresies, seems to represent everything that childrens literature, as a genre, was designed to keep out. Indeed, this does seem to be very much the way that childrens literature was marketed in the late eighteenth century, at exactly the same time that the Gothic was really taking off, written by the same women novelists who were responsible for the promotion of a safe and segregated childrens literature. This collection examines the early intersection of the Gothic and childrens literature and the contemporary manifestations of the gothic impulse, revealing that Gothic elements can, in fact, be traced in childrens literature for as long as children have been reading.