A Loss Beyond Imagining: Child Disappearance in Fiction

Abstract

Child disappearance in its many forms, as abduction and kidnapping cases highlighted by the media, as the absence of children from the family, or as the impossibility of maintaining an a-historical definition of 'childhood', constitutes a dominant structure of feeling of late modernity. The latter affects contemporary children's fiction as exemplified by two case-studies of children's picture books, namely Maurice Sendak's "Outside Over There" and John Sciezska and Lane Smith's "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales", which display contrasting modes of the picture book's involvement with child disappearance.