A Somber Pedagogy—A History of the Child Death Bed Scene in Early American Children's Religious Literature, 1674–1840 (original) (raw)
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The author of the article discusses the sensitive topic of the social taboo of death with regard to the process of the child’s education and development, with particular focus on the use of thanatological literature as a factor shaping the child’s personality. The text presents the perception of the death phenomenon by children, and the essence as well as functions of thanatological literature. It also shows the impact of child and childhood discourses on four well-known literary works for children (at the kindergarten and pre-school age), dealing with the discussed topic. The selected research method consists in qualitative analysis of the content. The works have been selected due to their popularity and presence in scientific publications on the topic of death in children’s literature. Analytical categories of the selected literary works include subjective and objective approach to the child and childhood. The first approach is consistent with the perspective of sociology of child...
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The Gothic has become a dominant mode in children’s and young adult fiction published in the past decade. Gothic children’s literature displaces the anxieties that ordinarily accompany the representation of child death in realist fiction. In this chapter, I consider how dead or ghostly children in contemporary Gothic children’s literature interact with history by rewriting past wrongs and restoring order. The texts that I examine, Sonya Hartnett’s The Ghost’s Child (2007), Chris Priestley’s Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror (2007), Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008), and Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011), all represent spectral children who, in diverse ways, work to critique or remedy adult actions. These fictions for young people are, I suggest, distinctly different from contemporary Gothic fictions for adults, which often represent children as the bearers of death. In Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, children of the 1940s who possess supernatural powers work with the sixteen-year-old protagonist from the present to stave off the “wights” and “hollowgasts” who seek to devour them. These humanoid and monstrous forms respectively were born out of the unnatural desire of adults for immortality. A human secret society is at the root of evil, including the attempted murder of the child protagonist, Nobody Owens, in The Graveyard Book. Nobody is raised by ghosts who protect him from the society and teach him the supernatural abilities of haunting, fading, and dream walking. Yet the children in Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror cannot be saved, becoming “shadow children” because they are not sufficiently protected, or are lead astray, by adults. While The Ghost Child is a clear example of the redeeming and transformative power of a spectral child for an elderly protagonist confronting death.
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The emerging field of pediatric palliative care recommends that terminally ill children and their parents engage in compassionate and honest communication about the end of life. Extensive clinical experience and research attests that young patients often derive comfort from asking questions, sharing their hopes and fears, and receiving loving reassurance. Nevertheless, these conversations can be extremely challenging, both for parents and clinicians. Seeing how parents in the past approached this sensitive subject provides food for thought. The following discussions draw on my book, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, which is based on the analysis of hundreds of diaries, letters, and medical texts from c.1580 to 1720. At this time, almost a third of children died before the age of fifteen. Rather than shielding their offspring from these foreboding facts, parents encouraged their children to think about their own mortality, even before illness struck. The intention was make mortality familiar to the young, thereby taking the fear out of the unknown. It was part of the ‘preparation for death’, a religious process that was designed to help the individual to reach a state of peaceful acceptance, and even happiness, about dying. The article explores this preparation process.
2007
The nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation of child hagiographies in the form of memoirs, written mostly by evangelical Protestant women. Immensely popular at the time, the memoirs were used by religious tract societies and Sunday school publishers as a means of converting children and adults. Women memoirists were seldom recognized as authors in their day and current scholarship has ignored their cultural contributions. This article examines the ways in which these authors used the memoir form and the trope of child death, as well as specific rhetorical strategies, such as emphasizing visions of heaven, mediumship, and intercession with spirits, to challenge and revise traditional Protestant views of the afterlife.