Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. The Social Function of Child Cruelty

   • Monica Flegel, Christopher Parkes

   Pages 1-14

3. Early Exemplars of the Cruel Child

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 15-15

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   2. “This Sport of Tormenting”: Cruel Children and Their Animals in British Literature, 1750–1800

      • Heather Ladd

      Pages 17-40

   3. Innocent Cruelty and the Love of Beauty in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales

      • Monica Flegel

      Pages 41-59

   4. Anne Is Angry: Female Beauty and the Transformative Power of Cruelty in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables

      • Christopher Parkes

      Pages 61-77

4. Bullying and Its Uses

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 79-79

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   2. Old-School Bullies at Hogwarts: The Pre-Victorian Roots of J. K. Rowling’s Depiction of Child-on-Child Violence

      • Katharine Kittredge, Carolyn Rennie

      Pages 81-103

   3. Bullies, the Bullied and Bullying Narratives in Contemporary Fiction

      • Clare Bradford, Lara Hedberg

      Pages 105-125

   4. Murderous Misfits and Misguided Mentors in Rohan O’Grady’s Let’s Kill Uncle

      • Rebecca A. Brown

      Pages 127-149

5. Child Killers and Child Victims

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 151-151

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   2. Exceptional and Destructive: The Dangerous Child and the Atom Bomb in Postwar Science Fiction

      • Kristen Gregory

      Pages 153-172

   3. “Tag … You’re It”: Cold War Comics and the Performance of Boyhood and Criminality

      • Hans Staats

      Pages 173-191

   4. “Child Psychopath” Films of the 1980s and 1990s

      • Karen J. Renner

      Pages 193-216

   5. A “Voodoo Doll in Diapers”: Deconstructing the Cruel Child in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)

      • Sandra Dinter

      Pages 217-236

6. Cruelty and Child Agency

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 237-237

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   2. “I Want to Die as Myself”: Young Adult Dystopias, Cruelty, and Resistance

      • Carrie Hintz

      Pages 239-256

   3. “Kindness in a Cruel World”: The Formation of Agentic Non-heteronormative Identity in Contemporary YA Fictions

      • Victoria Flanagan

      Pages 257-275

   4. Camping the Killer Child: The Queer Humor of William March’s The Bad Seed on Page, Stage, and Screen

      • Tison Pugh

      Pages 277-298

7. Back Matter

   Pages 299-312

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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.

• Bullying
• Gender
• Race
• Class
• Schools

• Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada

  Monica Flegel, Christopher Parkes

Monica Flegel is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Lakehead University, Canada. Her research focuses on cultural studies, specifically addressing children, animals, and pop culture and fandom. She is the author of Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture (2015).



Christopher Parkes is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Lakehead University, Canada. His research focuses on children’s literature. He is the author of Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850-1914 (Palgrave, 2012).  His current research focuses on YA fiction and the end of social mobility in America.

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