Description
Book SynopsisThis collection examines the child’s role in contemporary post-apocalyptic films and television. In these narratives, children have occupied conflicting positions—as harbingers of disaster or as symbols of survival and hope. The child in many post-apocalyptic narratives occupies a unique space that oscillates between civilization and tribalism, human and animal, life and death, hope and despair, faith and nothingness. By exploring the ways the child character functions within a dystopian framework, the chapters in this book illustrate how traditional notions of childhood are tethered to sites of adult conflict and disaster, a connection that often works to reaffirm the “rightness” of past systems of social order.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Debbie Olson
Chapter 1. Post-Apocalyptic Mosaic: The Road and the Image of the Child as an Eschatological Symbol of Hope.
Nick Petrov
Chapter 2. Into the Woods: Mother Nature as Protector of Young Female Survivors in Post-Apocalyptic Film and Television
Elaine Morton
Chapter 3. Youth on its Own: Growing Up in a Lonely Post-Apocalyptic World
Denis Newiak
Chapter 4. Reanimating the past: Post-Apocalypse and the First Nation Child in Cargo (Howling & Ramke, 2017)
Matthew Smith
Chapter 5. The (Zombie) Child, the Animal, and ‘the Human Part’ in AMC’s The Walking Dead
Monica Sousa
Chapter 6. (Re)storying Collective Ethics: Tracing Absences in Figurations of Childhood in Post-apocalyptic Film
Cory Jobb
Chapter 7. "Don’t Stray Too Far:" [Robot] Parents and [Posthuman] Children
Ingrid E. Castro and Joseph V. Giunta
Chapter 8. “Being” and “Becoming” of the “Unbecoming” Child: Hybrid Children in the Post-Apocalyptic world of Sweet Tooth
Suniti Madaan and Cijo Joy
Chapter 9. “It’s just not yours anymore”: [Dis]Ability, Childhood, and the Death of Innocence in The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)
Debbie Olson
