ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how contemporary texts turn to Victorian literature and culture to navigate the tensions and instabilities that often shape our present-day attitudes toward and understandings of young people. It provides collection gestures to larger questions regarding the place of the Victorian in contemporary works for children and adolescents. The chapter indicates the distinctive status of the Victorian as both iconic and malleable serves as a primary appeal for creators of contemporary literature and film for children and adolescents. It also considers the ways present-day ideals, desires, and anxieties surrounding childhood and adolescence are being navigated through literature that is also clearly focused in some way on the past. The chapter demonstrates Victorian literature for audiences of all ages provides a broad foundation upon which to explore complex and evolving ideas about young people. It draws the various engagements with Victorian literature and culture in twenty-first-century children's and adolescent texts.
