Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King's IT

Abstract

Up to this point, the work that has been done on IT is almost exclusively devoted to the novel’s adaptations, the iconic—if not particularly faithful—television miniseries adaptation from 1990 and the two more recent cinematic reboots from 2017 and 2019. This volume, however, focuses on the fertile terrain of literary and cultural critique afforded by the original novel. Spanning discussions of American surveillance culture, intergenerational conflict, the legacies of settler colonialism in the novel and films, serial-killer fanaticism, and many more topics that galvanize critical engagements with the novel, this volume offers an exploration of the ways the novel, so like its antagonist, replicates (or disavows) the icons of various canons and categories in order to accomplish specific psychological and cultural work. Each of the chapters in this book attends to the myriad ways that IT, through its various adaptations and its haunting villain Pennywise, actively subverts the dominant codes of the eras under which it operates. In this way, it explores the contours of the novel’s permanence as a means to interrogate our unwavering attachment to our best-known killer clown. Much like the Ritual of Chüd, the circuitous, psychically-charged battle of wills between the band of protagonists in the novel and Pennywise, this collection recognizes that the key to IT’s longevity lies in its symbiotic relationship with the audience that interpolates it. This volume reads the protagonists’ constellations of countermoves against Pennywise as productive outlines of critique effectuated by the richness of the clown’s reflective power.