![]() This remarkable and shrewd book covers territory that is both basic and thought-provoking. Here were pre-echoes of Freud and James, and of most of the texts that Schober examines so revealingly. He meant that, in the growing child, and healthy adult, rationality and energy need each other if the soul or psyche is not to be flabby and undernourished. “Without contraries is no progression,” he wrote. 5), although poet William Blake wisely saw that in practice both such “contrary states” (the subtitle of Schober’s book) might be allowed. To the notion of original sin, the Romantics opposed “original innocence” (p. The Romantics, post-Rousseau, on the other hand, almost deified the child - whose potential to be “father of the man” in thought and deed became their special study and concern. In particular, Roman Catholicism and Puritanism regarded the child with suspicion, as inheriting Original Sin and being like a “little devil” in need of taming (and baptism). Underpinning Schober’s study is his concern to trace religious and Romantic attitudes to the child (both in life and in fiction), which historically have tended to be opposed. 61) but in fact it pioneered techniques later used by audience-implicating filmmakers like Friedkin and Robert Wise and Alfred Hitchcock, not to mention an entire concept of how society regards (or disregards) childhood sexuality, as set out in James Kincaid’s book Erotic Innocence (1998), cited several times by Schober. James called his tale an “irresponsible little fiction” (p. ![]() Henry James seems to have deliberately incorporated that ambiguity into his groundbreaking tale of possession and pre-pubescent sexuality The Turn of the Screw (1898), going so far as to tease the reader with the possibility that the “ghosts” reported by the two children actually emanate from the hysterical mind of their repressed governess. 16) - thereby raising timeless questions about whether any of us can really “know ourselves”. One advantage for writers who employ “the possession motif”, he notes, is that “it casts the child as both good and evil, innocent and corrupt, victim and villain” (p. Adrian Schober treats all of these events with seriousness and scholarly insight, befitting his book‘s origin in a doctoral thesis for Monash University, Australia. 38-39) In 1971, William Peter Blatty wrote his novel The Exorcist, an instant best-seller and the basis of his screenplay for the blockbusting William Friedkin movie two years later. REVIEW: In 1689, the Reverend Cotton Mather watched four children of a Boston family exhibit “strange fits” such that, at times, “their Heads would be twisted almost round and … they would roar exceedingly”. The book adopts a unique interdisciplinary approach, which offers new insights by examining the possessed child trope within a broad historical and cultural perspective. He compares these American representations with those from other national contexts, as well as its treatment in the field of children's literature. In this thought-provoking analysis of the shifting cultural perceptions of the 'good' and 'evil' child, Schober revisits such American classics as The Scarlet Letter and The Turn of the Screw, while examining its more contemporary face in books and films such as The Exorcist and E.T. In the first full-length study of this image, Adrian Schober argues that the possessed child is first and foremost an American phenomenon that may be traced to certain religious and cultural factors in the United States. The book and film helped spawn an entire generation of possessed youngsters throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The possessed child made a spectacular impact in the 1970s with The Exorcist, which was a literary, cinematic, cultural and social phenomenon.
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