Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures

1. The Social Function of Child Cruelty; Monica Flegel and Christopher Parkes.- 2. "This Sport of Tormenting": Cruel Children and their Animals in British Literature, 1750-1800; Heather Ladd.- 3. Innocent Cruelty and the Love of Beauty in Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales; Monica Flegel.- 4. Anne is Angry: Female Beauty and the Transformative Power of Cruelty in L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables; Christopher Parkes.- 5. Old-School Bullies at Hogwarts: The Pre-Victorian Roots of J.K. Rowling's Depiction of Child-on-child Violence; Katharine Kittredge and Carolyn Rennie.- 6. Bullies, the Bullied and Bullying Narratives in Contemporary Fiction; Clare Bradford and Lara Hedberg.- 7. Murderous Misfits and Misguided Mentors in Rohan O'Grady's Let's Kill Uncle; Rebecca Brown.- 8. Exceptional and Destructive: The Dangerous Child and the Atom Bomb in Postwar Science Fiction; Kristen Gregory.- 9. "Tag . . . You're It": Cold War Comics and the Performance of Boyhood and Criminality; Hans Staats.- 10. "Child Psychopath" Films of the 1980s and 1990s; Karen J. Renner.- 11. A "Voodoo Doll in Diapers": Deconstructing the Cruel Child in Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003); Sandra Dinter.- 12. "I Want to Die as Myself": Young Adult Dystopias, Cruelty, and Resistance; Carrie Hintz.- 13. Kindness in a Cruel World: The Formation of Agentic Non-Heteronormative Identity in Contemporary YA Fictions; Victorian Flanagan.- 14. Camping the Killer Child: The Queer Humor of William March's The Bad Seed on Page, Stage, and Screen; Tison Pugh.