Abstract
This chapter explores the depictions of mutated, gifted, and destructive children that flooded American fiction in the wake of World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima. Gregory suggests that these narratives became so popular because these children allowed Americans to express and alleviate their fears about not only childhood but also their atomic anxieties. The advanced child with cruel instincts, the child who puts his exceptional abilities to work against his household, community, and nation, became a fitting metaphor for another sort of monstrous creation—the atom bomb. In this way, the horror of the dangerous child as a harbinger of our mortality and a threat to the social order was given special expression in postwar America.
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Gregory, K. (2018). Exceptional and Destructive: The Dangerous Child and the Atom Bomb in Postwar Science Fiction. In: Flegel, M., Parkes, C. (eds) Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72275-7_8
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