Children’s literature is traditionally seen as a carrier of various ideologies as well as an important factor in children’s socialisation, for example in terms of the representation of age. A children’s book that portrays older characters as frail people with old-fashioned habits will influence the young reader’s perception of older people in their own environment,… Continue reading Shuffling and Sighing
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What’s age got to do with it?
Age is a complex phenomenon. Think about the following questions for a moment: How old are you? And how old do you feel? How old do other people think you are? And how do you and others know these things? Some of those insights may hearken back to the books you read as a young person, as… Continue reading What’s age got to do with it?
Determining author or reader
Due to the nature of literary texts as being composed of words rather than numbers, they are not an obvious choice to serve as data for statistical analyses. However, with the help of computer programs, words can be converted to numbers and specific parts of a text can be examined on a large scale. Textual… Continue reading Determining author or reader
Adult Authors and Child Characters Experiencing Memory
This essay demonstrates the fruitfulness of applying a lens based on 4E-inspired cognitive narratology to David Almond’s My Name is Mina (2010) in order to illuminate how the so-called cognitive-affective imbalance between children and adults needs reassessing, especially when it comes to memory. Merging recent developments in 4E – or embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive… Continue reading Adult Authors and Child Characters Experiencing Memory
A style for every age
The oeuvres of ‘crosswriters’ or ‘dual audience authors’ who write for both children and adults form the perfect touchstones for research on the similarities and differences between children’s literature and literature for adults. By means of stylometry, a digital research method that aids in studying style, the works of ten Dutch and English language dual… Continue reading A style for every age
You have to set the story you know aside
As with other twenty-first-century rewritings of fairytales, Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron complicates the classic ‘Cinderella’ fairytale narrative popularized by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm for new audiences, queering and race-bending the tale in its decidedly feminist revision of the story. However, as we argue here, the novel also provides an interesting intervention in the… Continue reading You have to set the story you know aside