CONTINUING EDUCATION Vampires and Witches Go to School: Contemporary Young Adult Fiction, Gender, and the Gothic Michelle J. Smith 1 • Kristine Moruzi 2 Published online: 1 February 2018 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract In the twenty-first century, the Gothic has experienced a cultural resur- gence in literature, film, and television for young adult audiences. Young adult readers, poised between childhood and adulthood, have proven especially receptive to the Gothic’s themes of liminality, monstrosity, transgression, romance, and sexuality (James, 2009, p. 116). As part of the Gothic’s incorporation into a broad range of texts for young people, the school story—a conventionally realist genre— has begun to include supernatural gothic characters including vampires, witches, angels, and zombies, and has once again become a popular genre for young readers. Michelle J. Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia. One of her primary research areas is Victorian girls’ literature and culture and she is currently completing a study of female beauty titled ‘‘Beautiful Girls: Consumer Culture in British Literature and Magazines, 1850–1914’’. Michelle is the author of From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840–1940) (U of Toronto P, 2018, with Clare Bradford and Kristine Moruzi) and Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880–1915 (Palgrave, 2011). She has also co-edited four books in the fields of children’s literature and Victorian literature, including Affect, Emotion and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017, with Moruzi and Elizabeth Bullen). Kristine Moruzi is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia. She recently completed an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research fellowship on The Charitable Child: Children and Philanthropy in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (2014–2017). She is the author of Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915 (Ashgate, 2012) and is co-author (with Michelle J. Smith and Clare Bradford) of From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840–1940) (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Her most recent publication is an edited collection on Affect, Emotion and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017, with Smith and Elizabeth Bullen). & Kristine Moruzi kmoruzi@deakin.edu.au 1 Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia 2 Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia 123 Children’s Literature in Education (2018) 49:6–18 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-018-9343-0