Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock (1984) and Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) are two British novels that evoke an intense friendship between a girl and an older man. In this article, Vanessa Joosen explores their experimental narrative forms which include a complex chronology, unreliable narrator, dream scenes, gaps, and a rich intertextual network to frame an intergenerational friendship that can be read as intergenerational desire. The experimental narratives and reflections on the fluidity of age enable Smith and Jones to evoke this controversial topic without fulling addressing it. A lot is at stake for Fire and Hemlock, given that it is addressed to young readers and there is concern that children’s books could be used for grooming. Controversially, both novels locate the desire in the young girl rather than the old man and explore the agency and moments of disempowerment that the female characters experience. However, an age gap between childhood and adulthood is crucial in qualifying a relationship as “intergenerational desire,” and here, the novels’ experimental structures and fuzzy chronologies create ambiguity. In addition, the books create confusion about the nature of the attraction between the characters. They exploit the ambiguity that incomplete memories, unreliable narration, narrative gaps, metaphors, and intertextual references leave when thematizing what could be defined as friendship, kinship, love, and/or sexual attraction.
Joosen, Vanessa. ‘Holding Hands: Intergenerational Desire in Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock and Ali Smith’s Autumn’.
Poetics Today, vol. 44, no. 1–2, 2023, pp. 131–156.
doi: 10.1215/03335372-10342127
Dreams can function in children’s books as a means to connect young characters and older figures in the story. In this article, Vanessa Joosen presents three methods to study intergenerational encounters in and through dreams in a selection of contemporary Dutch children’s books. She does this by means of a digital analysis of a corpus of 81 books to shows that the older the characters are, the less they are described as dreaming. Next, a close reading of intergenerational dreams lays bare, amongst others, the associations of dreaming with healing and death. Finally, a reader response study reveals that young children already understand some dream mechanisms and that older readers sometimes may draw on Freudian theory to interpret dreams, but that some also resist that.
Joosen, Vanessa. ‘Encounters of a Dreamy Kind: Dreams as Spaces for Intergenerational Play and Healing in Dutch Children’s Literature’.
Traum und Träumen in Kinder- und Jugendmedien, edited by Iris Schäfer, Brill, 2023, pp. 35–49.
doi: 10.30965/9783846767481_003
Despite their shared interest in questions of age, prejudice and agency, the fields of childhood studies, age studies and children’s literature studies remain relatively separate. This is clear from their diverging definitions and uses of terms such as ‘ageism’, ‘aetonormativity’, ‘adultism’ and ‘childism’. In this article, Vanessa Joosen employs the concept of ‘childism’ (John Wall) to point out the benefits that a collaboration between these fields would bring, mainly in terms of researching intergenerational relationships. Drawing on Anne Fine’s The Granny Project (1983), she further shows that children’s books themselves can contribute to the paradigm shift envisioned by Wall. Fine’s novel about four children’s resistance to their parents’ plans to take their grandmother to a retirement home demonstrates a belief in the agency of young readers. The potential for intergenerational understanding that Wall puts at the heart of his concept of ‘childism’ also comes strongly to the fore.
Joosen, Vanessa. ‘Connecting Childhood Studies, Age Studies and Children’s Literature Studies: John Wall’s Concept of Childism and Anne Fine’s The Granny Project’.
Barnboken, vol. 45, 2022.
doi: 10.14811/clr.v45.745
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 construction of age as related to gender for its female protagonists. Drawing on Sylvia Henneberg’s examination of ageist stereotypes in fairytale classics and Susan Pickard’s construction of the figure of the hag, we explore the dialogic between the fairytale revision, traditional fairytale age ideology and the intersection of age and gender in this reinvention of the classic narrative. By focusing on constructions of age, particularly senescence, we demonstrate how complex constructions of older characters might aid in overall depictions of intergenerational relationships, and how these intergenerational relationships in turn reflect historical and cultural impetuses of retelling fairytale narratives.
Anjirbag, Michelle Anya & Vanessa Joosen. ‘“You Have to Set the Story You Know Aside”: Constructions of Youth, Adulthood and Senescence in Cinderella Is Dead’.
Humanities, vol. 11, no. 1, 2022, p. 25.
doi: 10.3390/h11010025
Views on age not only determine the stories in children’s books, but also have an impact on the field of children’s literature. A lot of attention is paid to the dynamics between children and adults. While you could consider children and adults as two different age groups, you could also see them as part of a continuum made up of an array of age phases that gradually merge into each other and that show many similarities. The ‘difference model’, ‘deficit model’, and ‘kinship model’ are approaches that are used to research such topics. Bart Moeyaert has always criticised the distinction between children’s literature and adult literature. Throughout his writing career he has been through different age stages while expressing varying age norms. As he got older, he put more emphasis on the kinship between children and adults. In his novels, he depicts adults who missed out on a lot because they didn’t spend enough time with their children, but he also evokes role models who show what is to be gained by the kinship between young and old.
Joosen, Vanessa. ‘Van kind naar kinship : de constructie van leeftijd in de literatuuropvattingen van Bart Moeyaert in de loop van zijn schrijverschap’.
Spiegel der Letteren, vol. 63, no. 1–2, 2021, pp. 89–112.
10.2143/SDL.63.1.3289319
Many books for children are about young characters. However, older characters are also often featured in stories for children, and characters’ ages can change throughout certain books. By reading such stories, children find out about ideas regarding age via books. Stereotypes such as the ‘old witch’, or the ‘wise old mentor’ spark ideas that old women are mean, or that old people are wiser than younger people. There are, however, just as well books that have the intention of distancing themselves from entrenched ideas. More and more attention is being given to intergenerational dialogue and a nuanced view of old age. Research on age in books and the ways in which readers deal with such images can show how children’s literature contributes to ideas on age.
Joosen, Vanessa. ‘Aging in children’s literature’.
Encyclopedia of gerontology and population aging, edited by Danan Gu and Matthew E. Dupre, Springer, 2022, pp. 280–284.
doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_250-1
