Savage Girls and Wild Boys

Those of you who attended the OGOM Company of Wolves Conference will know that I have a special interest in wild or feral children and by coincidence one of the authors that Kaja has just posted on, Katharine Rundell, has also written a story called ‘The Girl Savage: ‘Wilhelmina Silver’s world is golden. Living half-wild on an African farm with her horse, her monkey and her best friend, every day is beautiful…..’

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Marcus Sedgwick’s Dark Horse is my favourite ever story of a feral or wolf child with a hidden past – those who find her destroy her wolf family in the belief that they are saving her but in fact she is happy in the caves and she retains her wolf memories – the book poses the question of whether she will eventually betray her human ‘kin’, recover her lupine nature and return to the forest (and then of course there is the question over her mysterious human identity). I’m excited to be teaching this brilliant evocation of the Rousseauvian child of nature (with a supernatural twist) on  Generation Dead: YA fiction and the Gothic. The course is due to start on January 18th.

I am busy revising my feral children paper for the forthcoming CoW book too and I have been doing further research on Peter the Wild Boy. I will be presenting a paper ‘The strange and surprising adventures of Peter the Wild Boy’ at the Heritage Narratives symposium on the 18th December at University of Hertfordshire. This is convened by Dr Ivan Phillips, who is a staunch supporter of OGOM and has a chapter in the OGOM book. The symposium is on from 9.45-4.00 (AA 191 Art and Design Building, College Lane).

I’m uncovering lots of new material on wolf children which I hope to post about shortly!

About Sam George

Associate Professor of Research, School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire Co-convenor OGOM Project
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One Response to Savage Girls and Wild Boys

  1. firekrank says:

    This is wonderful. We shall have to compare our notes about Wolf Wilder once we have both read it. I hope the talk goes well on the 18th December – sorry I won’t be there.

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