Edward Gorey's Neo-Victorian Picturebooks: Unravelling the Dark Humours of Childhood Culture

该项目通过关注20世纪美国作家、插画家和戏剧设计师爱德华·戈里（Edward Gorey）和他描绘暴力和儿童死亡的维多利亚风格图画书，研究儿童文学和儿童文化中的黑色幽默。具体来说，我将展示戈里如何通过木偶剧的惯例将维多利亚时代的文学和戏剧幽默融入他的越轨绘本中，以确定它们是儿童文学。我还论证了他模棱两可的结局构成了战后美国人关于童年道德复杂性的观念，挑战了维多利亚时期一些文学作品中对童年纯真的感伤观点。这个项目是通过历史研究的混合方法进行的——借鉴潘趣和朱迪的收藏和爱德华·戈里的档案——结合文学批评分析。这是第一次将幽默作为儿童文学的重要组成部分进行大规模、跨大西洋、跨学科的研究，揭示了戈里备受争议的绘本，这些绘本很少被归类为儿童书籍。对戈里动态的文本-图像关系和他对儿童的滑稽虐待的研究发展了儿童文学中的幽默的学术研究，奇怪的是，尽管它与儿童文化有着普遍的联系，但对它的研究却很少。此外，探究英美两国的动态关系可以发现，儿童幽默的表现形式同时存在重叠和分歧。此外，戈里绘本的阐释多元性揭示了对童年建构的重新思考，模糊了成人和儿童读物之间的界限。这项研究的跨大西洋焦点为新维多利亚时代的研究提供了新的见解，这些研究主要局限于英国的社会和文化领域，允许国际范围。该项目还揭示了儿童文学与戏剧文化之间的密切关系，以及哥特式和文学幽默之间的关系。通过将戈里的绘本确定为儿童文学，本研究提供了对更广泛领域的批判性重新思考，并扩展了儿童书籍的范围。

This project investigates dark humour in children's literature and childhood culture through its focus on the twentieth-century American writer, illustrator, and theatrical designer, Edward Gorey, and his Victorian-style picturebooks that depict violence and childhood death. Specifically, I will demonstrate how Gorey incorporates Victorian literary and theatrical humour into his transgressive picturebooks via conventions of the puppet show in order to identify them as children's literature. I also demonstrate that his ambiguous endings frame postwar American notions of the moral complexity of childhood, challenging sentimentalised view of childhood innocence in some Victorian literature. This project is conducted via mixed methodology of historical research-drawing on Punch and Judy collections and Edward Gorey's archives-combined with literary critical analysis. This is the first large-scale, transatlantic, interdisciplinary research of humour as a crucial component of children's literature, casting light on Gorey's controversial picturebooks, which are rarely categorised as children's books. Investigation into Gorey's dynamic text-image relationship and his comically sadistic treatment of children develops scholarship on humour in children's literature, which has been strangely under-researched despite its common associations with childhood culture. Moreover, interrogating the British-American dynamic reveals a simultaneous overlapping and divergence in manifestations of childhood humour. Furthermore, interpretative plurality of Gorey's picturebooks reveals a reconsideration of constructions of childhood, blurring the line between books for adults and children. The transatlantic focus of this study yields new insights into neo-Victorian studies that is largely limited to the British social and cultural sphere, allowing for international reach. This project also reveals close relationships between children's literature and theatrical culture, as well as the Gothic and literary humour. By identifying Gorey's picturebooks as children's literature, this study offers a critical reconsideration of the wider field and extends the scope of children's books.