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"""An original spin on literary criticism."" * Publishers Weekly * “In his absorbing short study . . . Gross offers an extraordinary account of a certain form of uncanny childhood.” * Times Literary Supplement * ""Lovely and completely idiosyncratic . . . [Gross] ruminates upon eight very strange fictional children, ranging from Lewis Carroll’s Alice to Nabokov’s Lolita. Read alongside one another, they . . . allow us to see things anew: silence and speech, subjecthood and objecthood, sense and nonsense. Gross’s thinking is subtle and stylish.'"" * Commonweal * “An original—and fruitful—approach to literary criticism.” * Irish Times * “A series of startling insights and evocations, Dangerous Children reveals just how uncanny and enigmatic children can be. In eight really quite brilliantly subtle chapters Gross shows us, improbably, that we have never really been curious enough about childhood.” -- Adam Phillips, author of On Getting Better “This exhilarating, risk-taking study draws together children figured in disparate writers and transfigures our reading of them. Lewis Carroll and Kafka, Elizabeth Bowen and Richard Hughes, Nabokov and Henry James, Collodi and Barrie, all generate dangerous children who live between play and death. Gross brilliantly conveys their mystery.” -- Gillian Beer, author of Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll “Gross doesn’t call his children dangerous for nothing. From Carroll’s Alice to Collodi’s Pinocchio and Nabokov’s Lolita, they are all fictional and therefore cannot die. They are also especially well equipped, in this subtle analysis, to suffer and explore the dangers of innocence entangled in knowledge. As the text reminds us, it was very clear to the heroine of What Maisie Knew that she was not supposed to know things. The book is a wonderful read on many accounts, not least because its apparently pastoral topic becomes so eerie.” -- Michael Wood, author of Yeats and Violence"

A series of startling insights and evocations, Dangerous Children reveals just how uncanny and enigmatic children can be. In eight really quite brilliantly subtle chapters Gross shows us, improbably, that we have never really been curious enough about childhood. -- Adam Phillips, author of Unforbidden Pleasures

A series of startling insights and evocations, Dangerous Children reveals just how uncanny and enigmatic children can be. In eight really quite brilliantly subtle chapters Gross shows us, improbably, that we have never really been curious enough about childhood. -- Adam Phillips, author of Unforbidden Pleasures This exhilarating, risk-taking study draws together children figured in disparate writers and transfigures our reading of them. Lewis Carroll and Kafka, Elizabeth Bowen and Richard Hughes, Nabokov and Henry James, Collodi and Barry, all generate dangerous children who live between play and death. Gross brilliantly conveys their mystery. -- Gillian Beer, author of Alice in Space

Author Information

Kenneth Gross’s books include The Dream of the Moving Statue, Shakespeare’s Noise, Shylock is Shakespeare, and Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, which won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. A former fellow of the Guggenheim and Bogliasco Foundations, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bellagio Study Center, and the American Academy in Berlin, he teaches English at the University of Rochester.  

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