Dangerous Children
On Seven Novels and a Story
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
Gross explores our complex fascination with uncanny children in works of fiction.
Ranging from Victorian to modern works—Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, Franz Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man,” Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—Kenneth Gross’s book delves into stories that center around the figure of a strange and dangerous child.
Whether written for adults or child readers, or both at once, these stories all show us odd, even frightening visions of innocence. We see these children’s uncanny powers of speech, knowledge, and play, as well as their nonsense and violence. And, in the tales, these child-lives keep changing shape. These are children who are often endangered as much as dangerous, haunted as well as haunting. They speak for lost and unknown childhoods. In looking at these narratives, Gross traces the reader’s thrill of companionship with these unpredictable, often solitary creatures—children curious about the adult world, who while not accommodating its rules, fall into ever more troubling conversations with adult fears and desires. This book asks how such imaginary children, objects of wonder, challenge our ways of seeing the world, our measures of innocence and experience, and our understanding of time and memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this erudite study of eight child characters from literature, critic Gross (Puppet) examines how "their way with stories is often at odds with that of the adults around them." The characters "ask us to think differently about innocence, how innocence gets lost or stays in place, how it takes up changed forms," Gross writes. He argues that Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland explores "the uncertain threshold between the adult and the child, in Alice herself and among the creatures she meets," while in Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, the character's "uncanny" status as a wooden puppet means he "remains bound to death." Odradek, in Franz Kafka's short story "The Cares of a Family Man," meanwhile, is an "old spirit," and Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica parses the ways adults try to "find out the truth of what the children have gone through." Gross notes that "my choice of subjects is in the end a personal one," and indeed his close readings are shot through with pensive personal reflections: "I keep going back over the book in my mind, trying to give shape to that sadness, to say where it lives," he writes of Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart. The result is an original spin on literary criticism.
