Download or read book Evil Children in the Popular Imagination written by Karen J. Renner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on narratives with supernatural components, Karen J. Renner argues that the recent proliferation of stories about evil children demonstrates not a declining faith in the innocence of childhood but a desire to preserve its purity. From novels to music videos, photography to video games, the evil child haunts a range of texts and comes in a variety of forms, including changelings, ferals, and monstrous newborns. In this book, Renner illustrates how each subtype offers a different explanation for the problem of the “evil” child and adapts to changing historical circumstances and ideologies.

Download or read book The Evil Child in Literature Film and Popular Culture written by Karen J. Renner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'evil child' has infiltrated the cultural imagination, taking on prominent roles in popular films, television shows and literature. This collection of essays from a global range of scholars examines a fascinating array of evil children and the cultural work that they perform, drawing upon sociohistorical, cinematic, and psychological approaches. The chapters explore a wide range of characters including Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter series, the possessed Regan in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, the monstrous Ben in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, the hostile fetuses of Rosemary’s Baby and Alien, and even the tiny terrors featured in the reality television series Supernanny. Contributors also analyse various themes and issues within film, literature and popular culture including ethics, representations of evil and critiques of society. This book was originally published as two special issues of Literature Interpretation Theory.

Download or read book Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child written by Anthony Esolen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Play dates, soccer practice, day care, political correctness, drudgery without facts, television, video games, constant supervision, endless distractions: these and other insidious trends in child rearing and education are now the hallmarks of childhood. As author Anthony Esolen demonstrates in this elegantly written, often wickedly funny book, almost everything we are doing to children now constricts their imaginations, usually to serve the ulterior motives of the constrictors. Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child takes square aim at these accelerating trends, in a bitingly witty style reminiscent of C. S. Lewis, while offering parents—and children—hopeful alternatives. Esolen shows how imagination is snuffed out at practically every turn: in the rearing of children almost exclusively indoors; in the flattening of love to sex education, and sex education to prurience and hygiene; in the loss of traditional childhood games; in the refusal to allow children to organize themselves into teams; in the effacing of the glorious differences between the sexes; in the dismissal of the power of memory, which creates the worst of all possible worlds in school—drudgery without even the merit of imparting facts; in the strict separation of the child’s world from the adult’s; and in the denial of the transcendent, which places a low ceiling on the child’s developing spirit and mind. But Esolen doesn’t stop at pointing out the problem; he offers clear solutions as well. With charming stories from his own boyhood and an assist from the master authors and thinkers of the Western tradition, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child is a welcome respite from the overwhelming banality of contemporary culture. Interwoven throughout this indispensable guide to child rearing is a rich tapestry of the literature, music, art, and thought that once enriched the lives of American children. Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child confronts contemporary trends in parenting and schooling by reclaiming lost traditions. This practical, insightful book is essential reading for any parent who cares about the paltry thing that childhood has become, and who wants to give a child something beyond the dull drone of today’s culture.

Download or read book Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures written by Monica Flegel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people’s agency.

Download or read book The Undead Child in Popular Culture written by Craig Martin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-07 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of representations of children and childhood, a global team of authors explores the theme of undeadness as it applies to cultural constructions of the child. Moving beyond conventional depictions of the undead in popular culture as living dead monsters of horror and mad science that transgress the borders between life and death, rejuvenation, and decay, the authors present undeadness as a broader concept that explores how people, objects, customs, and ideas deemed lost or consigned to the past might endure in the present. The chapters examine nostalgic texts that explore past incarnations of childhood, mementos of childhood, zombie children, spectral children, images and artefacts of deceased children, as well as states of arrested development and the inability or refusal to embrace adulthood. Expanding undeadness beyond the realm of horror and extending its meaning conceptually, while acknowledging its roots in the genre, the book explores attempts at countering the transitory nature of childhoods. This unique and insightful volume will interest scholars and students working on popular culture and cultural studies, media studies, film and television studies, childhood studies, gender studies, and philosophy.

Download or read book Grimm s Trailer Full of Secrets written by Rhonda V. Wilcox and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-01-24 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NBC's Grimm is an understudied series full of compelling characters, including Monroe, the charmingly knowledgeable vegetarian who looks like a werewolf; Wu, the funny cop who beats his way to the truth; Adalind, the enjoyably vengeful, risk-taking witch; Trubel, the furious young loner accused of insanity; Kelly, a powerful older warrior-woman; Nick, a compassionate detective; Hank, Juliette, Rosalee and others. This book, which includes a chapter on each key figure, explores the fascinating world of characterization in television. The storyline, as well as the dialogue, acting, costumes, scenery, lighting and music, contribute to in-depth depictions that evolve over time. Grimm's figures confound our perceptions of race, age and gender. They demonstrate the ability of TV characters to build unforgettable, meaningful connections.

Download or read book Connected Histories written by Eva Pfanzelter, Dirk Rupnow, Éva Kovács, Marianne Windsperger and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-04-20 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Pattern of Violence written by David Alan Sklansky and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A law professor and former prosecutor reveals how inconsistent ideas about violence, enshrined in law, are at the root of the problems that plague our entire criminal justice system—from mass incarceration to police brutality. We take for granted that some crimes are violent and others aren’t. But how do we decide what counts as a violent act? David Alan Sklansky argues that legal notions about violence—its definition, causes, and moral significance—are functions of political choices, not eternal truths. And these choices are central to failures of our criminal justice system. The common distinction between violent and nonviolent acts, for example, played virtually no role in criminal law before the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet to this day, with more crimes than ever called “violent,” this distinction determines how we judge the seriousness of an offense, as well as the perpetrator’s debt and danger to society. Similarly, criminal law today treats violence as a pathology of individual character. But in other areas of law, including the procedural law that covers police conduct, the situational context of violence carries more weight. The result of these inconsistencies, and of society’s unique fear of violence since the 1960s, has been an application of law that reinforces inequities of race and class, undermining law’s legitimacy. A Pattern of Violence shows that novel legal philosophies of violence have motivated mass incarceration, blunted efforts to hold police accountable, constrained responses to sexual assault and domestic abuse, pushed juvenile offenders into adult prisons, encouraged toleration of prison violence, and limited responses to mass shootings. Reforming legal notions of violence is therefore an essential step toward justice.

Download or read book Watching Murder written by Simon Cottee and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-24 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Watching Murder shines a light onto the dark world of jihadi murder videos and the people who watch and share them on the internet. Images and videos of murder, torture and other cruelties are everywhere on the internet. Why do some people seek out and watch this material, how are they affected by it and do they have a right to watch any of it in the first place? In this ground-breaking book, terrorism scholar Simon Cottee visits the murky fringes of the internet in search of answers. Focusing on ISIS, he shows how the group transformed the urban myth of the snuff movie into a grim reality watched by tens of thousands of people across the globe. On shock-sites, he finds a contingent of ISIS fans who, while hating the group, love to watch its most monstrous depredations in high definition. He interviews his fellow extremism researchers and asks them about all the dark things they have seen online and how this has affected their mental health. He speaks with the "cleaners" whose job is to report and remove violent jihadi propaganda from the internet. And he surveys thousands of young adults to find out what they think of ISIS and its notorious beheading videos. Cottee exposes the hysteria around online radicalization, and shows how our engagement with violent online spectacles is much more complex and multifaceted than many would have us believe. Watching Murder will appeal to anyone with an interest in violence, media, terrorism and ISIS. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of terrorism studies, political science, culture and communication.

Download or read book Images of Childhood written by Paul Duncum and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07-13 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a rich legacy of pictorial evidence, Images of Childhood examines historical constructions of childhood and how they reinforce or challenge the prevailing view of childhood as a state of innocence. Each chapter explores how visual elements such as framing, points-of view, and lighting, as well as clothes, accessories, and body language, help to construct our many different conceptions of children: from members of the family unit and assumed gender roles; to schooling and aesthetic objects; through to their economic value and use in political propaganda. Skillfully navigating a multitude of perspectives on this topic, Paul Duncum considers both how our ideas, beliefs and values have changed throughout history and how some have remained unchanged. He also explores the cultural notion of “the child within” and how this has contributed to the way adults perceive children. The result is a text far broader in scope than any other in its field, as art history is interweaved with contemporary popular culture to explore how we visually represent childhood. In doing so, the book highlights the real-life implications that these representations have on children's rights.

Download or read book George MacDonald s Children s Fantasies and the Divine Imagination written by Colin N. Manlove and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great Victorian Christian author George MacDonald is the wellspring of the modern fantasy genre. In this book Colin Manlove offers explorations of MacDonald's eight shorter fairy tales and his longer stories At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, and The Princess and Curdie. MacDonald saw the imagination as the source of fairy tales and of divine truth together. For he believed that God lives in the depths of the human mind and "sends up from thence wonderful gifts into the light of the understanding." This makes MacDonald that very rare thing: a writer of mystical fiction whose work can give us experience of the divine. Throughout his children's fantasy stories MacDonald is describing the human and divine imagination. In the shorter tales he shows how the imagination has different regions and depths, each able to shift into the other. With the longer stories we see the imagination in relation to other aspects of the self and to its position in the world. Here the imagination is portrayed as often embattled in relation to empiricism, egotism, and greed.

Download or read book Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries written by Erin Sheley and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period, this book uncovers how the cultural narrative affected the development of the law itself in the 18th and 19th centuries in three case studies: adultery, child criminality and rape testimony.

Download or read book Childhood Literature and Science written by Jutta Ahlbeck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we understand, imagine and remember childhood? In what ways do cultural representations and scientific discourses meet in their ways of portraying children? Childhood, Literature and Science aims to answer these questions by tracing how images of childhood(s) and children in Western modernity are entangled with notions of innocence and fragility, but also with sin and evilness. Indeed, this interdisciplinary collection investigates how different child figures emerge or disappear in imaginative and social representations, in the memories of adult selves, and in expert knowledge. Questions about childhood in Western modernity, culture and science are also addressed through insightful analysis of a variety of materials from the Enlightenment age to the present day – such as fiction, life narratives, visual images, scientific texts and public writings. Analysing childhood as a discursive construction, Childhood, Literature and Science will appeal to scholars as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as: Childhood Studies, History, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Sociology of the Family.

Download or read book The Face in the Mirror written by Marion Crook and published by arsenal pulp press. This book was released on 2002-07-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being a teenager in today's complex world is a difficult enough task, but adopted teens have a unique struggle: to discover their identity and a sense of belonging and place in the world, which often means coming to terms with their past. The Face in the Mirror, based on numerous interviews with adopted teens, adoptive parents, and birth parents, brings attention to the growing and often controversial phenomenon of teenagers wanting to know where they came from. The book, written for both teenagers and adults, is a frank discussion of the issues surrounding adoption, and in particular what adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents should know when adopted teens want to discover their past. The book also addresses the impact of cross-cultural or cross-racial adoption, as well as the legal parameters of adoption in the US and Canada, including the complex emotions involved. As written by Marion Crook, an adoptive parent herself and the author of previous books about teens, The Face in the Mirror articulates the complexity of adoption issues with candor and compassion.

Download or read book If I Ran the Zoo written by Dr. Seuss and published by Random House Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 1950 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gerald tells of the very unusual animals he would add to the zoo, if he were in charge.

Download or read book Just Babies written by Paul Bloom and published by Crown. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. From John Locke to Sigmund Freud, philosophers and psychologists have long believed that we begin life as blank moral slates. Many of us take for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society—and especially parents—to transform them from little sociopaths into civilized beings. In Just Babies, Paul Bloom argues that humans are in fact hardwired with a sense of morality. Drawing on groundbreaking research at Yale, Bloom demonstrates that, even before they can speak or walk, babies judge the goodness and badness of others’ actions; feel empathy and compassion; act to soothe those in distress; and have a rudimentary sense of justice. Still, this innate morality is limited, sometimes tragically. We are naturally hostile to strangers, prone to parochialism and bigotry. Bringing together insights from psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Bloom explores how we have come to surpass these limitations. Along the way, he examines the morality of chimpanzees, violent psychopaths, religious extremists, and Ivy League professors, and explores our often puzzling moral feelings about sex, politics, religion, and race. In his analysis of the morality of children and adults, Bloom rejects the fashionable view that our moral decisions are driven mainly by gut feelings and unconscious biases. Just as reason has driven our great scientific discoveries, he argues, it is reason and deliberation that makes possible our moral discoveries, such as the wrongness of slavery. Ultimately, it is through our imagination, our compassion, and our uniquely human capacity for rational thought that we can transcend the primitive sense of morality we were born with, becoming more than just babies. Paul Bloom has a gift for bringing abstract ideas to life, moving seamlessly from Darwin, Herodotus, and Adam Smith to The Princess Bride, Hannibal Lecter, and Louis C.K. Vivid, witty, and intellectually probing, Just Babies offers a radical new perspective on our moral lives.

Download or read book Bad Santas written by Paul Hawkins and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bad Santas is not a book for children. Here you will find the bloody, the bawdy and the downright bizarre in a celebration of the most imaginative, macabre and curious Christmas figures and customs from across Europe. Drawing on that continent's legacy of disquieting folk tales told at wintertime, Paul Hawkins' gleefully dark exploration of seasonal folklore is the perfect book for reading around the fireside.