The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts

Dylan Holdsworth is a casual academic at Deakin University. He was awarded his PhD in 2017, and his research interests include disability, gender, genre, children’s and young adult literature, and Australian literature. He has published chapters in Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy and the Critique of Otherness (2017), Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (2017), and Migratory Men: Place, Transnationalism and Masculinities (2023), as well as an article on crip-trans ghosts in paranormal horror cinema in Writing from Below (2023) with Tom Sandercock.

Introduction: Worlds of Difference.- Chapter 1 -Goblin-ology: Eugenics and hysterisation in George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872).- Chapter 2 -"Lonely, tender, passionate heart": Melancholy and Isolation in Dinah Mulock Craik's The Little Lame Prince and his Traveling Cloak (1875).- Chapter 3 -Building Beasties: Disability, Imperialism and Violence in William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954).- Chapter 4 -On the Fringes: John Wyndham's The Chrysalids (1955) and Technologies of the Self.- Chapter 5 -"A Perversion of Nature? How Exciting!": Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (1990), the Freak, the Monster and the Limits of Inclusion.- Chapter 6 -"Blind. Deaf. Disabled. Wheelchair": Community, History and Resistance in Jane Stemp's Waterbound (1995).- Chapter 7 -"This Magic Keeps Me Alive, but it's Making Me Crazy!": Amputation, Madness and Control in Adventure Time (2009-2018).- Chapter 8 -"Loss is Loss is Loss": Embodying the Family-as-Trauma in Julianna Baggott's Pure (2012).