The link between age and power has been studied from various perspectives in children’s literature. While some scholars mainly focus on the adult’s power, others discuss power on the child’s part, like Clémentine Beauvais, who argues that a child’s ‘might’ lies in the future that lies ahead of them. In his broader research project, Leander Duthoy explores how the reader’s age affects their understanding of age in children’s literature. With this chapter in Children’s Cultures after Childhood, he adds to the age-power debate by analysing readers’ reflections on age in the Dutch children’s book Iep! (Eep!; Joke van Leeuwen, 1996), which he gathered through 29 individual interviews and two focus-group conversations with twenty participants aged 9 to 75. In addition, Leander moves away from a strictly age-based analysis and considers some of the different ways in which the discussion of power – the ability to bring about or prevent change – involves a more dynamic and interconnected understanding of people’s individual experiences.
The interviews took place online during the COVID-19 lockdown, resulting in disempowerment on the part of some of the older participants, who needed help with the technology used. The child participants were dependent on their parents, who corresponded with Leander in their child’s name to arrange the interview. Some parents impacted the situation by attending their child’s interview. In turn, a few young participants also exerted a form of power in showing resistance, saying they only partook in the study because their parents obligated them or because they had to read a book for school anyway. In all cases, instead of looking at someone receiving help as ‘powerlessness’, it could be seen as an intergenerational entanglement that is both empowering and an inherent part of how age is constructed in a broader social and material context. In short, Leander explores how the participants’ individual experiences of Iep! are influenced by many different factors other than age alone. In other words, power is something both adults and children possess and often (re)negotiate together, as power is relational; power is influenced by the connections between different people, things, ideas and situations.
Duthoy, Leander. ‘Chapter 7: The Dynamics of Age and Power in a Children’s Literature Research Assemblage’.
Children’s Cultures after Childhood, edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González, John Benjamins, 2023, pp. 102–121.
doi: 10.1075/clcc.16.07dut
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 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
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.
