Children’s literature is often marked by an imbalance in age, as adult authors write for young readers. For this article, Vanessa Joosen interviewed seven children’s and young adult authors – Aidan Chambers, Guus Kuijer, Jacqueline Wilson, Anne Fine, David Almond, Joke Van Leeuwen, and Bart Moeyaert – to investigate how they negotiate and reflect on the growing temporal gap between their present age, their own youth, and their young readership when writing children’s or young adult literature. Although literary scholars typically avoid drawing direct parallels between authors’ lives and their fictional works, it cannot be denied that writers do draw on real-life experiences for inspiration and context.
Vanessa Joosen explores how the authors’ internal interactions between childhood and adulthood can take different shapes. It can lead to an emotional reconnection and a revision of past experiences on the one hand, and to new insights and even healing in their adult lives on the other hand. For example, David Almond explains how writing about the traumatic experiences of losing his sister and father at a young age was a coping mechanism, where instead of confronting these sad experiences directly, he reimagined them and used them as a basis for his fiction. Moreover, in creating child characters as an adult, the author’s adult experience and writing practice can also add new perspectives to their own engagement with childhood in general: instead of seeing children as lacking knowledge and experience, children’s authors cultivate the feeling of kinship in their writing, as they look for common ground between generations. Children’s literature offers a space where adults and children can come together, in and through stories. And although those fictional stories cannot be assumed to reflect experiences from childhood or adulthood perfectly authentically, they can be a start of real conversations through which generations can gain more understanding of what divides them, but more importantly, of what connects them.
Joosen, Vanessa. ‘Children’s Literature: Young Readers, Older Authors’.
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film, edited by Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung, and Raquel Medina, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023, pp. 51–62.
Tagged adulthood, age author, Aidan Chambers, Anne Fine, Bart Moeyaert, childhood, David Almond, fictional characters, Guus Kuijer, Jacqueline Wilson, Joke van Leeuwen
In western, contemporary societies, a woman is considered a “good mother” when she is at all times emotionally present and selfless, placing her children’s desires and needs before her own. Although this image of “good mothering” is often reproduced and thereby affirmed in children’s literature, so-called “alter-tales” – counterstories that voice different experiences of motherhood and alternative perspectives on what being a mother means – are becoming more popular. In this article, Frauke Pauwels examines how picturebooks can help in addressing the societal desire to dispel the “Good Mom Myth” and share genuine experiences of motherhood. By presenting the reality of being a mother in a format that is intended for children and adults, picturebooks showing alternative ways of being a mother can help tell stories of simple ways of resistance against the myth.
The Swedish picturebook Samtidigt i min låtsasvärld (Meanwhile in My Imaginary World, 2018) by author Lisa Bjärbo and illustrator Emma AdBåge depicts a mother’s daydreaming while sitting at the messy kitchen table with her two children, disrupting the expectation of the perfect mother through the usage of “childness” or “the quality of being a child” (Peter Hollindale). In her textual and visual analysis of Samtidigt i min låtsasvärld, Frauke Pauwels uses ideas from sociology, age studies and children’s literature studies, reflecting on how picturebooks can help to create an intergenerational understanding of real-life daily situations. Consequently, picturebooks that show the disparities between how motherhood is personally experienced and socially represented can play an important part in doing away with the idea that there is only one way of being a good mother.
Pauwels, Frauke. ‘Sharing Maternal Fantasies: Reading Samtidigt i min låtsasvärld as an Alter-Tale to the Good Mom Myth.’.
Barnboken – Journal of Children’s Literature Research, vol. 46, 2023, pp. 1–21.
doi: 10.14811/clr.v46.825
In this article, Leander Duthoy discusses how child and adult readers of children’s literature use the concepts of innocence and wisdom as age norms to reflect both on their own age and the age of fictional characters. He gathered data through semi-structured interviews and focus-group discussions with readers aged nine to seventy-five. In these conversations, Leander and his readers reflected on two Dutch language children’s books: Iep! (1996), written by Joke van Leeuwen, and Voor altijd samen, amen(1999), written by Guus Kuijer. Younger readers demonstrated an awareness of adult discourse surrounding childhood innocence, which some adopted without criticism, while others admitted to ‘performing’ innocence to escape adult ire. Furthermore, these same young readers also used innocence to ‘age’ young characters. For late adolescent and early adult readers, both young and old characters were sometimes deemed innocent. In contrast, older readers emphasised their own wisdom and reflected on the age of characters through that lens. Wisdom therefore emerged as a key age norm older readers used not only to praise older characters, but also to give positive meaning to their own experience of older adulthood. Notably, some characters that were perceived as especially wise by older readers were thought of as naïve and innocent by younger readers. Thus, the complexity of the readers’ responses challenged straightforward age-bound generalisations of wisdom and innocence.
Duthoy, Leander. ‘“I Became Much Wiser over Time”: Readers’ Use of Innocence and Wisdom as Age Norms in Responses to Children’s Literature’.
International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 15, no. 3, 2022, pp. 279–293.
doi: 10.3366/ircl.2022.0467
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 – approaches to cognition as proposed in philosophy of mind, with concepts such as fictional minds and storyworlds as discussed in cognitive narratology, I engage in close readings of My Name is Mina that reveal kinship between the adult author and his child character. Adults and children alike are “memorial fabulators” (Chambers), and 4E approaches to the cognitive study of literature can enrich the field of children’s literature studies and its considerations of adult authors’ mind depictions of child characters.
Silva, Emma-Louise. ‘Cognitive Narratology and the 4Es: Memorial Fabulation in David Almond’s My Name is Mina’.
Age, Culture, Humanities, vol. 6, 2022, pp. 1–29.
doi: 10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v6i.131854
