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Academics, researchers and postgraduate students in Contemporary English Literature; Gothic Literature; Children's Literature; Youth and Childhood Studies; Contemporary Popular Culture; Critical Theory.

Neil Gaiman’s novel Coraline (2002) has, for many critics, come to epitomize twenty-first-century gothic children’s fiction. Coraline borrows from Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’” to create an animistic realm, populated by symbols readily interpreted as infantile cathexes and repressed material. Critical assessment of the novel likewise evaluates it in these terms. Indeed, it is something of a critical commonplace to declare that psychoanalysis, the gothic, and the uncanny are the most apt tools for understanding the “child.” This paper asks what is culturally invested in this psychoanalytic reading of childhood. Using the case of Coraline , and remaining neutral about the truth value of psychoanalysis, this paper reopens gothicized uncanny childhood space to alternative readings.

Since the turn of the twenty first century, Gothic has emerged as one of the most popular forms in which to write for children. Although children’s literature critics and educational professionals were once dubious about the value of scary stories for children, postmillennial Gothic has begun to receive critical praise as well as mass market popularity. This thesis explores an emergent critical discourse that champions children’s Gothic alongside a variety of examples of the form. I argue that postmillennial children’s fiction employs metafictional reflexivity and explicit intertextuality, opening out into an expansive Gothic landscape. Unhoming its protagonists, readers and critics, postmillennial children’s Gothic challenges existing paradigms in both children’s literature criticism and Gothic Studies. Foremost, this fiction disrupts accounts of children’s literature that assign the form a pedagogical function, and that construct the child reader according to linear narratives of maturation offered by psychoanalysis and ego-relational psychology. In place of the ‘psychoanalytic child’, postmillennial children’s Gothic imagines a nomadic subject, constructing child protagonists and readers across a multiplicity of subject location and identities. There is not one child, but multiple figurations. The transgressive and liberating energies of Gothic play a part in this rejection of traditional figurations of the child. However, postmillennial children’s fiction also challenges critical commonplaces in Gothic Studies. The nomadic project of children’s Gothic runs counter to the melancholic figuration of subjectivity offered by a deconstructive psychoanalytic discourse that informs some analysis of Gothic literature. Unlike the tragic subjectivity of the Gothic wanderer, the nomad offers an affirmative figuration of being. The nomad is transformed through interrelationships with others, likewise transforming the locations through which it travels, suggesting new ways of reading Gothic. Taking its cue from Rosi Braidotti’s theory of nomadic subjectivity, this thesis engages productively with a variety of children’s texts published since 2000, reading them against existing criticism. I offer my analysis of these texts as part of a creative process that imagines non-unitary, non-binary figurations of subjectivity, and seeks to reformulate notions of reading and becoming.

In this chapter, I want to move on from books and explore further the transformative impulses of twenty-first-century children’s Gothic as it manifests in other media. The nomadic subject is not only produced within the pages of literature and pulp fiction, but also onscreen in a multitude of Gothic television programmes and films made for children and teen audiences in the twenty-first century. I will examine one particular example of such cultural production, the Gothic film parody. I am interested in Gothic film parody because, on the surface, such cultural products seem to confirm critics’ worst fears about the proliferation

In the previous chapter I suggested that it is the schoolboy that is the traditional, or founding, addressee of children’s literature. In this chapter, I want to think about the young female reader, arguably the addressee of the earliest Gothic fictions. In Zom-B the imagined male reader, or schoolboy, is courted through gross-out aesthetics and the trappings of a ‘masculine’ horror tradition. In contrast, the works examined in this chapter – Coram Boy (2000) by Jamila Gavin and Ruined (2009) by Paula Morris – evoke the explicitly ‘feminine’ tradition of Gothic Romance. The ‘feminine’ Gothic is separated from its ‘masculine’

From Coraline’s ‘uncanny’ house, I want to follow the nomadic subject of children’s Gothic into very different territory: the urban cityscape of the zombie apocalypse. In this location, Gothic challenges the pedagogical assumptions of children’s literature criticism by destabilising the process of identification that critics imagine exists between the child reader and the protagonist in the book. This process has been theorised differently by various critics, but, at root, it suggests that through identification with (or against) the protagonist, the child reader learns the valuable lessons the book has to teach. Darren Shan’s Zom-B presents a number of problems for

In the introduction, I suggested that A Series of Unfortunate Events, published at the beginning of the twenty-first century, refigured the child in Gothic fiction as a nomad, whose journey across an expansive terrain engages with, rather than rejects, an irredeemably corrupt world. This reading is at odds with Danel Olson’s assessment of the series in 21st-Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000. Olson suggests that A Series of Unfortunate Events opens and closes with ‘despair’, offering only an ‘unlikely’ hope in its final image of the Baudelaire orphans setting sail (2010: 521, 522). Olson emphasises the melancholic aspects of

Coraline, published in 2002, was one of the first novels to be warmly praised in an academic discourse championing children’s Gothic in the twenty-first century. In an essay titled ‘Between Horror, Humour, and Hope: Neil Gaiman and the Psychic Work of the Gothic’, Karen Coats suggests that children’s Gothic fiction is a ‘cultural symptom’ indicative of an underlying trauma at the heart of childhood (2008: 77). For Coats, Gaiman’s work exemplifies the way that new children’s Gothic fiction responds ethically to the ‘demands’ of child readers and meets their fundamental psychic ‘needs’ (2008: 78). Coats’s essay demonstrates how critics have