Evil Children Research Articles

Review: Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art

Review: Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art

Evil children in religion, literature, and art

Evil children in religion, literature, and art

Books Received

Books Received Mark I. West Behind the Veil of Familiarity: C. S. Lewis (1898-1998). Eds. Margarita Carretero González and Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio. New York: Lang, 2001. Apparently C. S. Lewis has attracted a considerable following in Spain, for this book's editors, as well as most of the contributors, are Spaniards. Although this collection of original essays covers the full range of Lewis' writings, there are several essays that focus on Lewis' books for children. Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture. By Ellen Pifer. Charlottesville, VA: U P of Virginia, 2000. Pifer examines the various portrayals of children in several novels, including The Turn of the Screw, Beloved, and Lolita. She argues that these novels reveal a deep ambivalence in Americans' responses to children. She does not cover any children's books, but her central argument would likely be of interest to children's literature specialists. Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art. By Eric Ziolkowski. New York: Palgrave, 2001. In his career as a professor of religion, Ziolkowski has taken a particular interest in the role that children play in Christian theology. This book focuses on the portrayal of "evil" children in various stories and works of art. Ziolkowski thoughtfully explores the theological implications that such children present to Christians. In his final two chapters, he touches on several children's books, such as Pinocchio and Peter Pan. Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking about Difficult Stories. By Loren Niemi and Elizabeth Ellis. Little Rock, AR: August House, 2001. Like most books published by August House, Inviting the Wolf In is intended for storytellers, but this book should be of interest to a much broader audience. Niemi and Ellis argue that children should not be sheltered from stories that deal with difficult subjects, such as evil, loss, sorrow, and grief. Literary Pathways: Selecting Books to Support New Readers. By Barbara Peterson. Westport, CT: Heinemann, 2001. Peterson provides lots of practical suggestions on how to select books that would appeal to emergent readers. She also recommends numerous titles that she has used when teaching reading to young children. Literature for Children: A Short Introduction, 4th ed. By David Russell. New York: Longman, 2001. Russell's textbook, which first came out in 1991, is now in its fourth edition. In this new edition, Russell has significantly expanded the chapter that deals with the history of children's literature. He has also updated his booklists and added new suggestions on how to use children's literature in the classroom. A Rainbow in the Desert: An Anthology of Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Children's Literature. Ed. and trans. by Yukie Ohta. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001. In this book, Ohta provides North American readers with a taste of Japanese children's literature from the first half of the twentieth century. The eleven stories and five poems in this book appear in English for the first time. [End Page 151] Copyright © 2001 Children's Literature Association

Little, Violent, White: The Bad Seed and the Matter of Children

Omen (1976)? Horror films that feature evil children or young teenagers, as Wheeler Dixon has pointed out, hit a peak in the 1970s: It's Alive (1973), Carrie (1976), The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), Damien: The Omen II (1978), The Changeling(1979) (80-81). Horror films from the 1970s and the early 1980s (Poltergeist [1982], Firestarter [1984], Children of the Corn [1984]) placed an emphasis on the possessed child, one whose powers or potential for evil stem from the demonic or supernatural. However, if we go back further into the history of the honor film, we see that one of the first films in the United States to feature the evil child does not appeal to forces outside of the child's body (forces that possess the body of the child, a trope from the 1970s), but rather locates the evil of the child within the body as an inherited, natural force that neither the child nor society can escape. In 1956, Patty McConnack starred as Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed, a film that produced a lasting cultural referent for children whose asocial, violently structured lives gain national attention.

Mapping the Cultural Geography of Childhood or, Performing Monstrous Children

This past holiday season, I received a card with an illustrated map on front labeled the Geography of Christmas (Hanson). I had recently finished reading Stephen Nissenbaum's Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday, and was struck by how succinctly this one illustration graphically represented Nissenbaum's 381-page book. illustration locates both (the North Pole, Bethlehem, 34th Street, and Vermont) and unreal (Toyland, Bedford Falls, Y's Men, and Where Fruitcakes Come From) within metaphorical space. Juxtaposing cultural references (a dotted line travels from Our House over an icon of a river and through pictured woods to Grandmother's House) with unabashed consumerism (F.A.O. Schwartz and Nieman Marcus are both represented), graphic illustrates American, public construction of holiday. map does not pretend to be a real representation, nor does it even touch upon religious substance of Christmas, although artist does include tongue-in-cheek religious references. card does not present a particular Christmas, nor any one individual's experience. Instead, using rich metaphor of geography, ilustration explores common constructions and understandings of a cultural event. It maps contiguity of Christmas-the juxtapositions and mixtures of images and icons-- arranging seemingly unrelated objects within performative space of holiday. This essay can be understood much in same manner-as an exploration of geography of childhood, with a specific focus-evil, infected, and monstrous children. Stories of bad children, children who steal, rape, sell drugs, or perform multiple murders fill today's news media. Indeed, construct of child occupies a prominent space within performative geography of childhood. Childhood is not universal. Humans, indeed most species, must necessarily experience biological immaturity, but childhood is manner in which a society understands and articulates that physical reality. Viewed in this light, child becomes a metaphor-a pattern of meaning-and childhood can be conceived of as culturally specific sets of ideas and philosophies, attitudes and practices (James and Prout 1). Unlike gender or race, childhood is a temporary and temporal classification; however, it can be understood in much same manner-as sets of power relationships revolving around different axes. Much in way that early feminists separated gender from sex and deconstructed understandings of natural, diverse ways in which American culture shapes and understands child can be unpacked and explored. This essay explores dark side of construction of child: as Goya declared, the sleep of reason produces monsters! (qtd. in Jenks 118). I approach this research from perspective of a performance theorist with a focus in children's theater and educational drama, and with central thesis that childhood exists as a type of performance space-a cultural geography-in which identities are performed on, in, and through child bodies. As Joseph Roach states, The processes of memory and forgetting, familiarly known as culture, may be carried out by a variety of performance events, from stage plays to sacred rites, from carnivals to invisible rituals of everyday life. To perform in this sense means to bring forth, to make manifest, and to transmit (xi). I am concerned here with manifestations of evil children through and in cultural performances. First, I turn my attention to character of Rhoda Penmark in Maxwell Anderson's Bad Seed. Anderson's play and later movie contain a narrative of child as pure evil, highlighting social tendency of parents to view their children as alien intruders (Kincheloe 164). This xenophobic response to childhood can be seen elsewhere, including Children of Corn, Exorcist, and Lord of Flies. …

Beliefs about prematurely erupted teeth in rural Yoruba communities, Nigeria.

A descriptive study was carried out in two villages: Badeku and Olodo, near the city of Ibadan, between May and November 1990. The objective of the study was to investigate the knowledge, beliefs and attitudes of respondents to premature eruption of deciduous teeth in babies. Of the 622 people interviewed, a large proportion (30.5%) believed that the first deciduous tooth should erupt between the age of 5-7 months; the next commonly mentioned time of tooth eruption was 7-9 months of age; and 50.3% of the respondents claimed to have seen a case of prematurely erupted primary teeth. There was a statistically significant association between age and also between educational status of respondents and having seen premature eruption of teeth (P < 0.01). The majority of the people (53.7%) felt that the condition was an indication of an evil child. Only 22.1% of those interviewed thought it could be just an individual variation. On the recommended remedy or management of the condition, as many as 26 (4.1%) said they would get rid of the child. A high percentage felt that sacrifices should be offered to appease the gods. It is suggested that a transcultural approach be adopted in managing cases in which the parents feel particularly anxious and uncomfortable about prematurely erupted teeth in order to cater for the social well-being of the child and family. It is also recommended that appropriate health education be directed at the society as a whole concerning this condition.