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Part of
Children's Cultures after Childhood
Edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 16] 2023
► pp. 71–86

Chapter 5
Childhood and its afterlives

Spectrality and haunting in children’s literature

| University of Cambridge

There is an opening in the study of children’s literature in the form of spectralities. By way of revealing this lacuna, this chapter diffractively reads J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan through Avery Gordon’s seminal spectral project Ghostly Matters. Reading these texts through one another shows that if we are to begin thinking after childhood, we must shift our conception of childhood away from a binary ontology governed by generational orderings. The argument presented herein is twofold: characters within children’s literature and the children’s book itself exist in dialogue with the past and the future, simultaneously before and after individual and subjective childhoods. Thus, a wider haunting occurs in children’s literature belonging to the so-called spectral turn that scholars have suggested exists across literature and culture.

Keywords: spectrality, hauntology, new materialism, childhood studies
Article outline
  • The spectral turn: An opening to children’s literature studies
  • Children’s literature without binaries?
  • “Poor little half-and-half (…) You will be a Betwixt-and-Between” (Barrie: 121)
  • He escaped, but his shadow hadn’t time to get out (Barrie: 214)
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.16.05pry
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