Adulthood in Children's Literature

by Vanessa Joosen, Lisa Sainsbury (Editor)

Overview

While most scholars who study children's books are pre-occupied with the child characters and adult mediators, Vanessa Joosen re-positions the lens to focus on the under-explored construction of adulthood in children's literature. Adulthood in Children's Literature demonstrates how books for young readers evoke adulthood as a stage in life, enacted by adult characters, and in relationship with the construction of childhood. Employing age studies as a framework for analysis, this book covers a range of English and Dutch children's books published from 1970 to the present.

Calling upon critical voices like Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Peter Hollindale, Maria Nikolajeva and Lorraine Green, and the works of such authors as Babette Cole, Philip Pullman, Ted van Lieshout, Jacqueline Wilson, Salman Rushdie and Guus Kuijer, Joosen offers a fresh perspective on children's literature by focusing not on the child but the adult.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350154810
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/19/2020
Series:	Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children's Literature
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

Vanessa Joosen is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where she specializes in children's literature studies, fairy-tale studies and age studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Defining adulthood in children's books
2. Grown-up children? The adult protagonist in children's literature
3. Hair, hair, everywhere: The adult body in children's literature
4. The disdainful adult: Childism in children's literature
5. From writing block to wonderful friend: The adult writer as character in children's literature
6. Second childhoods: The elderly adult in children's literature

Bibliography
Index