Chapter 5. Childhood and its afterlives

Abstract

There is an opening in the study of children’s literature in the form of spectralities. By way of revealing this lacuna, this chapter diffractively reads J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan through Avery Gordon’s seminal spectral project Ghostly Matters. Reading these texts through one another shows that if we are to begin thinking after childhood, we must shift our conception of childhood away from a binary ontology governed by generational orderings. The argument presented herein is twofold: characters within children’s literature and the children’s book itself exist in dialogue with the past and the future, simultaneously before and after individual and subjective childhoods. Thus, a wider haunting occurs in children’s literature belonging to the so-called spectral turn that scholars have suggested exists across literature and culture.