pbExploring how the figure of the wild child in contemporary fiction grapples with contemporary cultural anxieties about reproductive ethics and the future of humanitybbr br In the eighteenth century, Western philosophy positioned the figure of the child at the border between untamed nature and rational adulthood. Contemporary cultural anxieties about the ethics and politics of reproductive choice and the crisis of parental responsibility have freighted this liminal figure with new meaning in twenty-first-century narratives.ppIn iWild Childi, Naomi Morgenstern explores depictions of children and their adult caregivers in extreme situations--ranging from the violence of slavery and sexual captivity to accidental death, mass murder, torture, and global apocalypse--in such works as Toni Morrison's iA Mercyi, Cormac McCarthy's iThe Roadi, Lionel Shriver's iWe Need to Talk about Kevini, Emma Donoghue's iRoomi, and Denis Villeneuve's film iPrisonersi. Morgenstern shows how, in such narrativ