David Almond’s The Savage (2008), illustrated by Dave McKean, demonstrates how narrating enables the adolescent protagonist, Blue Baker, to explore themes of loss, grief and bullying in the embedded graphic narrative he creates about a savage boy, a story Blue calls ‘The Savage’. The metanarrative utterances in The Savage not only reveal Blue’s reflections regarding his role as narrator of ‘The Savage’, they are vital for understanding his experience of continuity-in-change. The Savage, which is ultimately a book about storytelling and illustrating, shows Blue engaging in reflective and transformative ‘narrative self-shaping’ (Hutto 2016). Based on narrative medicine, cognitive narratology, age studies and children’s literature studies, this essay underscores the importance of analysing age-related metanarrative comments in characters’ creative acts of shaping the self via narratives, ultimately showing how narrating tales and sharing stories can be empowering, and this across the lifespan.
Silva, Emma-Louise. ‘Continuity-in-Change in David Almond’s The Savage: Narrative Self-Shaping in Moments of Metanarrative’.
European Journal of Life Writing, vol. 11, 2022, pp. 93–111.
doi: 10.21827/ejlw.11.38318
These days, children often devour the entire Harry Potter series during their years at primary school. At the time of each publication, the character grew along with the readers: each volume saw Harry growing up. Based on a digital analysis of the books, it appears that the style of the books and the themes covered in the books changed along the way too. Sentences became longer and more complex. Slowly but surely, themes turned from food, school, and animals, to spiritual topics and death.
Haverals, Wouter & Lindsey Geybels. ‘Putting the Sorting Hat on J.K. Rowling’s Reader: A Digital Inquiry into the Age of the Implied Readership of the Harry Potter Series’.
Journal of Cultural Analytics, vol. 5, 2021, pp. 1–30.
doi: 10.22148/001c.24077
YA fiction is well known for stories that explore identity and identity change. Aidan Chambers’ Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999) explores such themes by telling the story of Jacob, whose characterisation and development can be considered by means of intertextuality. By looking at which ‘texts’, stories, or socio-cultural narratives have an impact on Jacob’s identity, and by exploring how such jigsaw pieces fit together, his identity can be considered as a text itself, shaped by the intertexts in his socio-cultural environment. This analysis focuses on how Jacob’s process of identity development is empowered through the various intertexts with which he is presented over the course of Postcards’ narrative.
Duthoy, Leander. ‘A Three-Dimensional Jigsaw made of Pliable Bits: Adolescent Identity as an Intertextual Construct in AidanChambers’ Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999)’.
Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 52, 2021, pp. 326–341.
doi: 10.1007/s10583-020-09425-6
Age determines the form and content of children’s books in many ways. People havexed ideas about what is suitable for a particular age and what is not, and digital tools can help to map and ask questions about such age norms on a large scale. For this project, the computer ‘read’ 32 Dutch-language children’s books published between 1975 and 2018, and it appears that explicit comments are often made about age in children’s books. Not only do we pay attention to childhood in the project, other life stages are explored as well. It seems that children’s books guard age norms the most, but these comments are often coloured by conflicts, humour, and irony.
Joosen Vanessa. ‘Te kinderachtig voor de kinderen? Leeftijdsnormen in jeugdliteratuur digitaal onderzocht’.
Vooys: tijdschrift voor letteren, vol. 37, no.3, 2019, pp. 1–9.
