Intimations of Mortality: Death in Children's Fantasy

<p>"Children's books have always been filled with death," Patrick Ness writes in his review of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. "You can't have an orphan without at least two dead people, after all." Literary childhood, from its origins, is not only associated with, but commonly defined by the experience of loss. This thesis argues that children's literature is fixated on endings; that it is marked by the insistent, and persistent, presence of mortality. Further, it argues that mortality is not just a prevalent theme, but a fundamental organising principle both thematically and structurally, working to define the genre and shape its form and substance. The mortal notes in children's literature are an inevitable effect of the peculiar conditions of its production. Children do not, for the most part, write their own literature: it is written by adults who necessarily write to, of, and for the child from a point in time irrevocably apart from it. Critic Jacqueline Rose has famously articulated the "acknowledged difference, a rupture almost, between writer and addressee" on which children's literature rests. The overwhelming presence of mortality in the genre is a direct effect of the rupture at its heart: inevitably aware of the acknowledged difference between writer and addressee, and filtered through adult memory and imagination, literary childhood cannot help but be framed as eulogy and elegy, constructed as the beginning of an ending. This reading, then, addresses the gap between adult and child that has occupied children's literature criticism for almost thirty years, but it moves beyond questions of power and control to focus on its creative effects. The thesis explores mortality and the construction of literary childhood in relation to adulthood in a range of fantasy subgenres. It begins with the classics of the Victorian Golden Age, exploring the writing of childhood at the origins of modern children's fantasy. The chapters on animal stories, toy stories and ghost stories all shed light on the figuring of childhood through close association and identification, each foregrounding particular qualities with which literary childhood is invested. In animal characters, primacy is given to an intense and largely contextless vitality, to an orientation in a paradoxically eternal and eternally fleeting present moment. Toys are memory boxes, highlighting the importance of the child (and children's literature) as a lieu de mémoire. Ghost characters emphasise the ways in which childhood is figured as past and as haunting, memorialised even in its presence. In time-slips and alternate world fantasy, the dissonant once-and-future oriented, mortal qualities of literary childhood manifest themselves in the manipulation of the time and space of setting. But as dependent as the impulse to elegy is on difference, it also depends for its entire effect on the inescapable continuity between adult and child. Put another way, we were once them. They will be us. That the "impossible" relation between adult and child is so neatly encapsulated by the memento mori – "that which you are, we were; that which we are, you shall be" – speaks to how and why mortality casts so deep a shadow in the literature.</p>

Intimations of Mortality: Death in Children's Fantasy

<p>"Children's books have always been filled with death," Patrick Ness writes in his review of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. "You can't have an orphan without at least two dead people, after all." Literary childhood, from its origins, is not only associated with, but commonly defined by the experience of loss. This thesis argues that children's literature is fixated on endings; that it is marked by the insistent, and persistent, presence of mortality. Further, it argues that mortality is not just a prevalent theme, but a fundamental organising principle both thematically and structurally, working to define the genre and shape its form and substance. The mortal notes in children's literature are an inevitable effect of the peculiar conditions of its production. Children do not, for the most part, write their own literature: it is written by adults who necessarily write to, of, and for the child from a point in time irrevocably apart from it. Critic Jacqueline Rose has famously articulated the "acknowledged difference, a rupture almost, between writer and addressee" on which children's literature rests. The overwhelming presence of mortality in the genre is a direct effect of the rupture at its heart: inevitably aware of the acknowledged difference between writer and addressee, and filtered through adult memory and imagination, literary childhood cannot help but be framed as eulogy and elegy, constructed as the beginning of an ending. This reading, then, addresses the gap between adult and child that has occupied children's literature criticism for almost thirty years, but it moves beyond questions of power and control to focus on its creative effects. The thesis explores mortality and the construction of literary childhood in relation to adulthood in a range of fantasy subgenres. It begins with the classics of the Victorian Golden Age, exploring the writing of childhood at the origins of modern children's fantasy. The chapters on animal stories, toy stories and ghost stories all shed light on the figuring of childhood through close association and identification, each foregrounding particular qualities with which literary childhood is invested. In animal characters, primacy is given to an intense and largely contextless vitality, to an orientation in a paradoxically eternal and eternally fleeting present moment. Toys are memory boxes, highlighting the importance of the child (and children's literature) as a lieu de mémoire. Ghost characters emphasise the ways in which childhood is figured as past and as haunting, memorialised even in its presence. In time-slips and alternate world fantasy, the dissonant once-and-future oriented, mortal qualities of literary childhood manifest themselves in the manipulation of the time and space of setting. But as dependent as the impulse to elegy is on difference, it also depends for its entire effect on the inescapable continuity between adult and child. Put another way, we were once them. They will be us. That the "impossible" relation between adult and child is so neatly encapsulated by the memento mori – "that which you are, we were; that which we are, you shall be" – speaks to how and why mortality casts so deep a shadow in the literature.</p>

The Artistry of Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman (1960-present) currently reigns in the literary world as one of the most critically-decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy-award winning DC/ Vertigo series, The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally-renowned in literary circles for works such as Neverwhere, Coraline, the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, etc. award-winning American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, for children, for the comic reader to the viewer of the BBC's Doctor Who, Gaiman's writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media and every language making him a celebrity on a world-wide scale. Despite Gaiman's incredible contributions to multiple national comics traditions (from such works as Miracleman to the aforementioned The Sandman), to the maturation of American comics as a serious storytelling medium, and to changing the rights of creators to retain ownership of their works, his work continues to be underrepresented in sustained fashion in comics studies. As American Gods tops ratings charts for Starz, Anansi Boys can be found in radio play from the BBC, and adaptations of some of his work from Trigger Warning and Fragile Things become standalone comics by renowned artists, it seems timely to bring the bulk of Gaiman's comics into the scholarly discussion. The thirteen essays and two interviews with Gaiman and his frequent collaborator, artist P. Craig Russell, a formal introduction, forward, and afterword examine the work (specifically-comics, graphic novels, picture books, visual adaptations of prose works, etc.) of Gaiman and a multitude of his collaborative illustrators. The essays radiate from an examination of Gaiman's work surrounding proclamations challenging his readers to "make good art'; what makes Gaiman's work unique and worthy of study lies in his eschewing of typical categorizations and typologies, his constant efforts to make good art-whatever form that art may take-howsoever the genres and audiences may slip into one another. What emerges is a complicated picture of a man who always seems fully-assembled virtually from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own skin and his own voice far later in his life.

The many graveyard books: artistic collaborations and possible multiple readings in illustrated works

This article investigates how diverse layers of meanings can be seen in different iterations of the same work, as it is illustrated or adapted by different artists. Departing from a single source material, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008), we analyze two versions and one adaptation of the text: one novel illustrated by Dave Mckean (2008) and another by Chris Riddell (2009); and a graphic novel (2014), adapted by P. Craig Russell. We draw our analysis from authors in the fields of Children's Literature and Comics Studies to dicuss the construction of meanings between the interplay of written and visual texts. Such interactions have a range of variation taking into consideration both the format of the work (novel or graphic novel), the choice of a scene to be illustrated, and stylistic approaches.

Dead and ghostly children in contemporary literature for young people

The Gothic has become a dominant mode in children’s and young adult fiction published in the past decade. This chapter considers how Sonya Hartnett’s The Ghost’s Child (2007), Chris Priestley’s Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror (2007), Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008), and Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) all represent dead or ghostly children who, in diverse ways, work to critique or remedy adult actions, particularly through their interactions with history. Contemporary Gothic children’s literature is, this chapter argues, distinctly different from Gothic fictions for adults, which often represent children as the bearers of death. In contrast, Gothic children’s literature displaces the anxieties that ordinarily accompany the representation of child death in realist fiction.

I am nobody: fantasy and identity in Neil Gaiman’s "The Graveyard Book"

With the popularity of fantasy literature in recent years, more and more writers of adolescent books shifted their attention to depicting the macabre and the bizarre. While authors of fantasy literature endeavor to show that something that is unreal, strange, whimsical, or magical nevertheless has an internal logic and consistency, at the same time, certain stereotypes typical of the realistic world are destabilized. In the imaginary world in which the events, settings, or characters are outside the realm of possibility, many ideas like love, truth, reality, and identity are constantly destabilized and contested. For example, in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008), which garners him the Carnegie Medal and the Newbery Medal, the problem of personal identity is apparent in Nobody Owens, an orphan whose parents are killed by a man called “Jack” and whose survival depends on the mercy of the ghosts living in the graveyard that Nobody runs to and hides in to escape Jack. This paper aims to discuss how the protagonist of The Graveyard Book grapples with his bewilderment when confronted with the myth of his identity and how the elements of fantasy are incorporated to help untangle this coming-of-age mythology.