Representations of Childhood Death

Book excerpt: Death in childhood has, until well into the twentieth century, been more common than for any other age. Surprisingly, then, despite growing interest in how death is understood in Western culture and how the bodies of different groups are treated in death, there has been no sustained study of childhood death. Representations of Childhood Death addresses this silence with discussions which range from analyses of the ways dead and dying children are represented in folklore, ballads and funeral monuments through seventeenth-century diaries, fantasy fiction, horror stories and on film.