Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas by Suzanne Manizza Roszak (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas by Suzanne Manizza Roszak Jessica R. McCort (bio) Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas, by Suzanne Manizza Roszak. U of Wales P, 2022. In Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas, Suzanne Manizza Roszak places at the center of her critical lens Gothic representations of childhood in texts representing a "broad range of multi-ethnic US, hemispheric American, and global literatures" (2). At its core, Roszak's book resists more traditional, Eurocentric narratives of Gothic childhood in the Americas that reinforced colonialist, imperialist, and white supremacist agendas and demonstrates how multi-ethnic US and hemispheric American writers have "refigure[d] uncanny youth in forms that have inverted these cultural scripts, using both the horrific injuries done to child and adolescent characters and their own subversive, resistive forms of Gothic power to disrupt the othering impulses of the Euro-American Gothic canon" (1). In doing so, Roszak builds upon efforts already made by other critics to disrupt Eurocentric studies and depictions of the Gothic, demonstrating that there is a "much more complicated history" of the genre that must account for a "complex and transnational constellation of origins" (1–2). In turn, Uncanny Youth encourages readers to broaden their understanding of the Gothic—particularly the way Gothic representations of childhood are read, taught, and discussed—and thereby opens further the critical examination of the hemispheric American Gothic to new and exciting directions for study, teaching, and research. Roszak's book is arranged into five chapters that approach Gothic youth from varying avenues, attending to representations of Gothic childhood and adolescence in literature for both youth and adult audiences. There have been studies in the last several years that operate in a similar vein, including books like The Gothic in Children's Literature: Haunting the Borders (2009), The Gothic Child (2013), Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture (2016), The Cultural [End Page 228] Construction of Monstrous Children: Essays on Anomalous Children from 1595 to the Present (2020), and Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves, Monstrous Others (2021). Roszak's unique contribution, however, is to concentrate specifically on Gothic representations of childhood in the literary Americas that have been overlooked in other studies and to argue that critics must pay more attention to the revolutionary power of Gothic youth in texts by authors who seek to challenge various forms of oppression and violence. As Roszak notes in her introduction, the book focuses primarily on how, "[i]n the modern and contemporary hemispheric American Gothic, stories of childhood and adolescence emerge as a literary way toward scrutinizing intersectional currents of social injustice that violently threaten young people and the communities that surround them" (3). However, Roszak is also careful to attend to the ways in which "Gothic youth also simultaneously functions as a site of resistance, highlighting the subversive potential of childhood to dismantle imperialist ideologies and the systems they uphold" (9). In this, Roszak's work is reminiscent of the efforts of scholars in such fields as girlhood studies who have tried to recognize the ways in which children have both manipulated and been manipulated by the structures of power that seek to mold and contain them. Following an introduction that sets up the book's theoretical foundations and lays out its argumentative framework, Roszak focuses first on authors' imposition of "perennial girlhood" on female characters as a rhetorical device designed to demonstrate political and cultural oppression. In this first chapter, Roszak contrasts the landmark Gothic short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) with Octavio Paz's La Hija de Rappaccini (1953) and Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête (1969). As Roszak notes in the book's introduction, many of the authors she addresses "are united by their participation in projects of literary, historical, and sociocultural rewriting. Many of their books are close re-envisionings of canonical texts" (7). This is especially the case in the first few chapters of Uncanny Youth, in which Roszak concentrates on authors grappling with canonically entrenched writers like Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Emily Brontë. Furthermore, Roszak also argues for the importance of reconsidering as...