Screening Children in Post-apocalypse Film and Television

by Ingrid E. Castro (Contribution by), Joseph V. Giunta (Contribution by), Cory Jobb (Contribution by), Cijo Joy (Contribution by), Suniti Madaan (Contribution by)

Overview

This collection examines the child’s role in contemporary post-apocalyptic films and television.. By exploring the function of child characters within a dystopian framework, this volume illustrates 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666918670
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/16/2023
Series:	Children and Youth in Popular Culture
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Debbie Olson is associate professor at Missouri Valley College.

Table of Contents

Introduction

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

Editorial Reviews

This follow-up to The Child in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema (2015) examines film and television narratives from The Hunger Games to Station Eleven through diverse critical and theoretical perspectives.. .that explore the dynamism of youth confronting a dystopian future.

Caryn Murphy

What makes the collection invaluable for film and media researchers of child representation is its extensive theoretical and cultural reach – it is grounded in key contemporary issues such as posthumanism, antihumanism, ecofeminism and AI that intersect with, or are contextualized by, contentious racial and social histories. … this is a highly recommended text for film and media scholars concerned with fictional child representation and contemporary perspectives in science fiction and eco-criticism.

Frances Pheasant-Kelly

Debbie Olson has contributed so much to the study of representations of childhood in the cultural imagination as both a writer and editor, so much, in fact, that this book is her second edited collection on the post-apocalyptic child in fictional narratives. However, this study feels especially urgent: the daily impact of climate change as well as the recent Covid-19 pandemic have revealed that humankind is more vulnerable than we might want to believe, and no one feels the pressure of these threats more than the young. The essays in this collection are so immediately contemporary that they directly reflect these recent blows to our confidence in our survival. Other narratives examined are older but still so pertinent, for it is precisely in the changing portrayals of the apocalypse that we can chart the roles our world imagines role children will play in maintaining the humanity of our species, no matter how we find ourselves having to live in the world.

Karen Renner

The apocalyptic story that can't be told—that would not sell books or movies—is that humans are doomed and that, because of their greed and folly, will join the thousands of species that have already gone extinct. Thus, this collection, edited by Olson, searches for sources of hope in contemporary film. Can art point the way, or is the apocalyptic film merely a way of acknowledging collective fear while clinging to various fantasies of transcendence? Varieties of hope are the dominant theme of this volume, and that hope is literally embodied by children surviving disasters of nuclear war, global pandemics, environmental meltdown, etc. These nine rich essays explore the iconography of children: as religious icons, or under the protection of an anthropomorphic “Mother Nature,” or symbols of past cultural apocalypses due to colonialism and its ongoing effects, or even as an image of survival through evolution into a “post-human” existence. Especially good is Olson's closing essay in this collection, which posits children as symbols of the death of innocence. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Choice Reviews