Book Review: Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject by Chloé Germaine Buckley

Abstract

Children’s literature has long intertwined with Gothic motifs, yet contrasting with the profound Gothic inheritance of children’s literature, the relevant research remains to be a relatively new direction, which has gained increasing popularity only in recent years. As the newest monograph in the field, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject brings out an exciting outlook to children’s Gothic studies, tracing through a range of children’s Gothic fictions between 2000 and 2015. Following Braidotti’s account of nomadic subjectivity, the book’s author Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley concludes that the theme of homelessness is a major concern for post-millennial children’s Gothic, which does not lead to despair but positive possibilities to new lives, regarding homelessness as nomadism—a concept echoing with the nomadic ethics of Deleuze’s philosophy, which expresses a process ontology that values change and motion over stability (Braidotti, 2013, p. 344).