Software companies are currently producing a wide range of digital apps, games, and picture book adaptations for young people. At the same time, there has been an eruption of research at the intersections of children’s literature, digital media, and online cultures. Contemporary scholarship about children’s new media tends to fall into two camps. In the first, scholars offer practical suggestions for deploying digital texts in an educational context. Those in the second camp diagnose and critique the anxieties that arise when children access virtual communities. Implicit in much of this scholarship is the idea that virtual texts and spaces require brand new approaches to both children’s literature and childhood itself.

This talk will illustrate how the longer history of “the virtual” helps us think through young people’s digital virtualities with greater nuance. Such a history illuminates how digital virtual space is often a site for contemporary iterations of longstanding anxieties and desires surrounding the child’s own virtual qualities. Derritt Mason will explore pre-digital virtualities in key works of children’s and young adult literature, including J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which depicts a relationship between childhood and the virtual that enables us to better theorize how digital texts for young people endeavour to construct and secure their audiences.

Derritt Mason holds the 2019-20 Wayne O. McCready Fellowship for an Emerging Scholar at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. He is the co-editor, with Kenneth B. Kidd, of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (Fordham UP, 2019) and the author of The Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture (forthcoming, UP of Mississippi).