Light In The Dark

As a representative writer of new generation of fantastic literature, Neil Caiman has catched a lot of eyes from the European and the United States literature for these ten years. The Graveyard Book, his masterpiece, was published in2008, and has spent over15weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. It also has received various awards and honors, including the famous Newbery Medal.The Graveyard Book tells about a story of a18th months old infant who has lived in a graveyard for15years and finally come back to the human world. With the secret and scary scenes, various grotesque images and suspenseful plots, the book has a special and distinctive characteristic of Gothic. However, in spite of the Gothic style of scary and secret, the fancy world of The Graveyard Book is till a spiritual world which is specific to children, and can bear children’s best hope and desire.The traditional Children’s Literature seldom concerns the theme of death and dark because of the specialty of children readers. While in The Graveyard Book, instead of avoiding the serious theme of dark and death, Neil Caiman put the "darkness" element as its major aesthetic object, and let the children reader face death world directly.From the point of view of "Gothic style", this paper mainly discusses how the traditional Gothic factors are reflected and how the Gothic techniques are creatively used in The Graveyard Book, and the reasons why it becomes popular by analyzing its setting, structure and characterisation. Then further to expound the features of Gothic style which are reflected in the level of textual strategy, thus to explore Neil Caiman’s writing features which represent both the Gothic art and children’s literature.There are five parts in this paper. Introduction generally introduces the main features of the book and traditional gothic novel, then, puts forth the purpose and meaning of this paper.The first part mainly discusses the gothic art factors of the book by analyzing the dark settings, offbeat plots, and freaky characterisations.The second part discusses the variations of gothic art. On one hand, Neil Caiman combines the authentic real world with the mysterious supernatural world, on the other hand, he also converts the original scary interests and modeling narrations by creatively using of alienation effect, humor, and tactics of "roller coaster rides", thus to change the death and dark into a higher aesthetic form with an aesthetic way, and creat a special Gothic style of children’s literature.The third part discusses the relationship between the Gothic World that the author created and the children’s inner world. First, it explains children’s position of Neil Caiman. Then, it illuminates how the authors’ creative views are embodied in the Graveyard Book. Finally, this paper further points out that the world view is the motivation of the author’s creation standpoint.In conclusion, this paper concludes that the Gothic style combined with children’s view has made up for the lake of the traditional fairy tale of children’s literature, and enriched the narrative space of the writing of children’ literature. Thus, the gothic style based on death and darkness could and should be used in children’s literature.