Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures

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 childrens literature. He is the author of Childrens 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.

1. The Social Function of Child Cruelty; Monica Flegel and Christopher Parkes.- 2. This Sport of Tormenting: Cruel Children and their Animals in British Literature, 1750-1800; Heather Ladd.- 3. Innocent Cruelty and the Love of Beauty in Oscar Wildes Fairy Tales; Monica Flegel.- 4. Anne is Angry: Female Beauty and the Transformative Power of Cruelty in L. M. Montgomerys Anne of Green Gables; Christopher Parkes.- 5. Old-School Bullies at Hogwarts: The Pre-Victorian Roots of J.K. Rowlings Depiction of Child-on-child Violence; Katharine Kittredge and Carolyn Rennie.- 6. Bullies, the Bullied and Bullying Narratives in Contemporary Fiction; Clare Bradford and Lara Hedberg.- 7. Murderous Misfits and Misguided Mentors in Rohan OGradys Lets Kill Uncle; Rebecca Brown.- 8. Exceptional and Destructive: The Dangerous Child and the Atom Bomb in Postwar Science Fiction; Kristen Gregory.- 9. Tag . . . Youre It: Cold War Comics and the Performance of Boyhood and Criminality; Hans Staats.- 10. Child Psychopath Films of the 1980s and 1990s; Karen J. Renner.- 11. A Voodoo Doll in Diapers: Deconstructing the Cruel Child in Lionel Shrivers We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003); Sandra Dinter.- 12. I Want to Die as Myself: Young Adult Dystopias, Cruelty, and Resistance; Carrie Hintz.- 13. Kindness in a Cruel World: The Formation of Agentic Non-Heteronormative Identity in Contemporary YA Fictions; Victorian Flanagan.- 14. Camping the Killer Child: The Queer Humor of William Marchs The Bad Seed on Page, Stage, and Screen; Tison Pugh.