Spectres of Childhood: Spectrality and Hauntology in Children’s Literature
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This thesis is the first study to apply the rich scholarship produced in the wake of the “spectral turn” to children’s literature. It utilises ghosts and haunting as a deconstructive methodology, as has been done broadly across the humanities and social sciences, to question if the presentation of childhood may be more hauntological than ontological in children’s literature. The purpose of this thesis is to tease out the complexities and contradictions in books for children that challenge the ontological separation of the adult and child. It also explores where literary representations might be said to align with, repeat, or complicate the agendas of spectrality theory.
Each chapter focuses on individual texts that have come to define children’s literature. The extended introduction utilises Peter Pan as a case through which to review the literature that connects so-called ‘spectralities’ and childhood. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the theoretical and literary connections between: childhood, memory, nostalgia and generationality. Chapter 1 considers Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There focusing on how the eponymous Alice is haunted by her namesake, Alice Liddell. It proposes that Liddell’s presence is embedded in the text’s construction and through it, she lives on, haunting its pages. Chapter 2 explores Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden as a case for the intergenerationality unique to children’s literature as a haunting modality. Contrary to existing critical opinion, spectrality reveals Pearce’s exploration of childhood remains active across the lifespan, where the children’s book is a spectral space between past and present, adult and child. Chapters 3 and 4 approach the phenomenological spectre, to consider how individual and subjective children may be depicted as haunted in literature. Chapter 3 examines girlhood, and the associated criticism of the gendered body, in J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Rowling’s girls occupy bodies that can be understood as spectral paradoxes, existing at once as both living and ghostly. Chapter 4 turns to Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy to consider how the evocation of haunting in the novel problematises issues of social erasure. The child refugee is rendered a figure of compromised agency and visibility, challenging societal boundaries between child and adult. Finally, the conclusion reviews the ‘openings’ that spectrality theory offers for further research and recommends it may be used as a method in future children’s literature analyses.
This thesis presents the critical lens of spectrality theory as an innovative onto-epistemological intervention for understanding the depiction of childhood in literature written for children. It offers scholars a new critical approach where hauntology suspends binary ontologies in generational orderings. This research is valuable for scholars of children’s literature and culture, and for those interested in childhood studies and the history of childhood. It introduces how spectrality theory can be usefully applied to children’s literary texts to explore meaning. Thus, it demonstrates the effectiveness of engagement with this new analytical method that has previously received extremely limited attention in children’s literature studies.