A Loss beyond Imagining: Child Disappearance in Fiction

Morgado, Margarida

doi:10.2307/3509061

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Ian McEwan's 1987 novel The Child in Time uses child disappearance as the central metaphor 48 in its 'dystopian, ecofeminist critique' 49 of Thatcherism. Stephen, a children's author, finds that his three-year-old daughter Kate has disappeared in a supermarket (Thatcher's 'super market' as moral threat).…”

Section: Children Lost Outside Found Withinmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spirits of enterprise: The disappearing child in Thatcherism and Theory

Dean

2017

Literature & History

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Thatcherism offered a promise of future prosperity based on unleashing the young male's ambition; simultaneously, its 'Victorian values' sought to retrieve a moral past. Literary depictions of Thatcherism make the child central to a resulting contradiction between imagined moral past and materialistic future. The disappearance of the child recurs in Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), Ian McEwan's The Child in Time (1987), and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004). These novels satirise how Thatcherism managed the contradictions in its vision of the future by attempting to regulate the child's ambitions. They even use the abducted, killed, or simply disappeared child to audaciously parody both the results of Thatcherite policy and contemporaneous practices of literary and psychoanalytic Theory, as each struggles to represent the child's interests in the future. Here Thatcherite materialism leads, unintentionally and ironically, to unacceptable material ambitions in the child.

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Section: Children Lost Outside Found Withinmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spirits of enterprise: The disappearing child in Thatcherism and Theory

Dean

2017

Literature & History

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“…Explorations of the reasons why children might become missing and, in turn, what these reflect about parent-child relations, family life and society more generally can also be found in contemporary cultural productions, with the missing child featuring as the subject of representations in the cinema (Wilson, 2003), theatre (Cousin, 2007), novels (Morgado, 2002), exhibitions (Collishaw et al, 2010), non-fiction (O'Hagan, 1995;Staff, 2007) and autobiographical memoirs (Wilcox, 2009). To take just one example from these different cultural genres, Kate Atkinson's novel, Started Early, Took My Dog, published in 2010 to excellent reviews, can be read as a modern-day fable about the lost or missing child.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Questions of innocence and guilt: child abduction and the representation of mothers in post-war British cinema

Fink

2012

Families, Relationships and Societies

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The figure of the missing child is a recurrent and highly visible feature of past and present culture, not only the concern of extensive reporting in the media but also a frequent motif in the cinema, theatre, popular fiction and autobiographical memoirs. This article is focused on the ways in which British feature films of the 1950s and 1960s portrayed the experiences of losing a child through kidnap or abduction, exploring in particular how mothers were represented. Through an examination of the complex and contradictory discourses through which motherhood and the maternal role were constituted in these films, the article considers what they reveal about the shifting meanings of the mother-child relationship and the dynamics of gender relations in the home and post-war society more generally. The films discussed are Lost (1956), Tomorrow at Ten (1962) and Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964).

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“… 88. Margarida Morgado, “A Loss beyond Imagining: Child Disappearance in Fiction,” The Yearbook of English Studies 32 (2002): 244–59, 244. …”

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confidence: 99%

The Deliberate Infliction of Infertility in Science Fiction

Grech

Vassallo

Callus

2015

World Futures Review

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Infertility in science fiction (SF) is a huge subject. This article limits itself to the intersection of the deliberate infliction of infertility on humans, aliens, and animals by intelligent agencies. These narratives demonstrate fear of death, of the unknown, and of loss of immortality through the inability to engender offspring. Many of these stories serve as modern parables that warn against excessive hubristic overreach in our chase for posthuman changes that may seem to be improvements but actually hamper or hinder humanity, in this case, through infertility. While serving as cautionary tales, almost all of these stories result in a happy ending, a common outcome in SF that readers and audiences have come to expect from the genre.

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A Loss beyond Imagining: Child Disappearance in Fiction

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Spirits of enterprise: The disappearing child in Thatcherism and Theory

Spirits of enterprise: The disappearing child in Thatcherism and Theory

Questions of innocence and guilt: child abduction and the representation of mothers in post-war British cinema

The Deliberate Infliction of Infertility in Science Fiction

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