The 21^st century has seen an increase in the publication of Gothic literature for children and young adults. The aim of this study is to explore this development and to discuss images of the child in Scandinavian Gothic fiction for children in relation to ideas about childhood in a contemporary context. What conceptions of childhood are depicted and elaborated on in Gothic literature for children and in what ways do these correspond to an understanding of childhood in contemporary Scandinavia?

The Gothic is a multifarious type of fiction that stages a double diegesis wherein a natural order is corrupted by a Gothic abyss. Chris Baldick’s Gothic chronotope, featuring a conflation of the past with the present within a closed setting, serves as an initial definition to examine a variety of possible scenarios where child protagonists prosper or founder in the confrontation with elements of the Gothic abyss. Utilizing the ideas of Michel Foucault, childhood is understood here as a discursive formation and images of the child are conceptualized through subjectification, a process consisting of technologies of power and technologies of the self. These technologies, alongside governmentality, serves as operative tools for analysis of child subjectification in both text and context. Drawing on the writings of Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, Karen M. Smith and others, the contemporary context, referred to here as high modernity, signals a radicalization with earlier stages of modernity. Bauman describes the present world as a liquid modernity and stresses, as does Giddens, the necessity of flexibility as the individual is continuously made responsible for the creation of a meaningful life. Childhood is very much part of this contextual mutation, which inspires new conceptions of childhood, both reaffirming and challenging traditional concepts.

The studied Gothic texts originate from Sweden, Denmark and Norway, and were published between 1997 and 2018. They consist of novels and short stories written by Ingelin Angerborn, Hilde Hagerup, Ingunn Aamodt, Dan Höjer, Katarina Genar, Mette Finderup, Magnus Nordin, Benni Bødker, Mårten Melin and Jesper Wung-Sung. The texts chosen include a variety of Gothic subgenres such as ghost stories, zombie literature, stories about animated objects and works alluding to werewolf and vampire fiction. The images of the child that emerge in Scandinavian Gothic fiction address issues such as child agency, the competent child, growth, government and the possibility of self-governing. Throughout the examined texts, the images of childhood are ambivalent and the competent child is frequently shadowed by its counterpart; a process of emancipation remains entangled with government through technologies of power, and the potential of growth is locked within the iterative pattern of the Gothic chronotope. This study shows that various, sometimes contradictory, images of childhood in children’s Gothic fiction constitute what can be referred to as the liquid childhood of high modernity.