Childlike Parents in Guus Kuijer’s Polleke Series and Jacqueline Wilson’s The Illustrated Mum

In this article, theories from age studies and children’s literature studies are combined to shed light on the construction of adulthood in books for young readers. The article begins with the sociological shift from a traditional model of adulthood with fxed benchmarks and increased commitment to a new ideal of fexibility in adulthood, as described by Harry Blatterer. It then explores how three acclaimed children’s books by Guus Kuijer and Jacqueline Wilson respond to this shift. The narratives all feature parents who display features that are explicitly labeled as “childlike” or that can be interpreted as diverging from the traditional model of “full” adulthood that Blatterer describes. As a result, the child protagonists are shown to experience stress and grief. Although the novels stress the playfulness of childlike adults as enjoyable, they ultimately promote a traditional model of responsible adulthood, even if few adult characters can actually live up to it

Writing when Young: Bart Moeyaert as a Young Adult Author

Duet met valse noten (1983) started as a diary when Bart Moeyaert was twelve years old. After it was disclosed by an older brother, Moeyaert rewrote it during his teenage years as a novel about first love. This article studies the genesis and early reception of Moeyaert’s novel to reflect on young authors who fictionalize real-life experiences and desires. On the one hand, they are credited for being experts on youth and said to have a particular appeal to young audiences for that reason. On the other hand, when texts by young authors are published, they are often edited and mediated by adult professionals. For some scholars, such adult intervention compromises the authenticity of the young author’s voice, while others argue that having your work revised is an inherent part of being published. The genesis of Duet met valse noten displays a complex interaction involving several actors, including young voices. The deletion of controversial passages (a toilet scene, the longing for cigarettes and sexual scenes) illustrates this complexity: the decision to adapt them was only in part governed by adults, and while the young Moeyaert was dissatisfied with some revisions, they also contributed to his aesthetics as a poetic rather than explicit writer

Encounters of a Dreamy Kind: Dreams as Spaces for Intergenerational Play and Healing in Dutch Children's Literature

Dreams can function in children’s books as a means to connect young characters and older figures in the story. This article presents three methods to study intergenerational encounters in and through dreams in a selection of contemporary Dutch children’s books. First, a digital analysis of a corpus of 81 books shows that the older the characters are, the less they are described as dreaming. 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

Te kinderachtig voor de kinderen? Leeftijdsnormen in jeugdliteratuur digitaal onderzocht

In Ik ben Polleke, hoor! (2001) van Guus Kuijer zegt hoofdpersonage Polleke: ‘Ik wil best leuke dingen met Spiek doen, maar ik wil niet op hem passen. Hallo? Horen jullie me? Ik ben pas twaalf hoor!’ Door onder meer dit soort reflecties op leeftijd dragen jeugdboeken bij aan de constructie van leeftijdsnormen en daarmee aan de socialisatie van kinderen, stelt Vanessa Joosen, hoofddocent jeugdliteratuur en Engelstalige literatuur aan de universiteit Antwerpen. Zij onderzocht deze sociale constructie van leeftijd in jeugdliteratuur eerder met een traditionele narratieve analyse. Met behulp van digitale methodes kon ze dat onderzoek op grotere schaal voortzetten en daarvan doet ze verslag in dit artikel. De combinatie van digital humanities en jeugdliteratuuronderzoek blijkt eerdere resultaten te kunnen verdiepen en nieuwe vragen op te werpen

Bart Moeyaert as Writer, Author, Performer, and Public Figure: "That's Also What Literature Can Be"

Though only in his mid-fifties, Bart Moeyaert began his writing career over forty years ago, when at age thirteen. In the course of almost four decades as a published author, Moeyaert’s views and writing practices have inevitably evolved. These developments can be attributed to personal experiences from living through adolescence, young adulthood, and middle age, which include his increased independence from his family, influential encounters, and the development of his career as an author and teacher. As a writer, he had the chance to experiment with new genres, topics, and writing styles, gradually growing into Belgium’s most acclaimed children’s author and gaining international fame. In this article, I highlight four crucial experiences that transformed Bart Moeyaert’s views on children’s literature and had an impact on his subsequent books: the influence of Aidan Chambers and his distinction between author and writer; the experience of writing primers with specific, target-audience restraints; the pleasure of performing for a dual audience; and his mandate as Antwerp’s city poet, which provoked a reflection on the writer as a public figure. What these experiences have in common is that they produced a tension between Moeyaert’s personal and artistic desires on the one hand and considerations for his readership and broader social needs on the other. As such, this article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Moeyaert’s developing poetics and diverse oeuvre, and to consider how an author’s growing age and concomitant experiences can influence their views and work

Van kind naar kinship: De constructie van leeftijd in de literatuuropvattingen van Bart Moeyaert in de loop van zijn schrijverschap

Intergenerational dialogue is central to children’s literature. According to Marah Gubar, the relationship between childhood and adulthood can be cast in terms of difference, deficit (stressing what children do less well) and kinship. In the course of his writing career, the Flemish children’s author Bart Moeyaert evolved from a discourse of difference and deficit to one of kinship. In adolescence and early adulthood, he presented himself as an expert on youth and even expressed mild disdain about his younger self. As he grew older, he shifted to a kinship model, stressing what children and adults share. The certainties associated with adulthood made way for an enduring searching attitude to life. Both Gubar and Moeyaert argue that viewing children and adults as fundamentally different increases the risk of unfounded generalisations. Fostering connections with youth, by contrast, can enrich adult perspectives with new experiences, including those offered by children’s books

Rewriting the Grandmother’s Story: Old Age in “Little Red Riding Hood” and Gillian Cross’ Wolf

Abstract: Feminist perspectives have strongly influenced the fairy-tale rewritings of the past decades, but the intersection of gender with other identity markers deserves more attention. This article applies the conclusions of Sylvia Henneberg’s critical examination of age and gender in fairy tales to Gillian Cross’s Wolf (1990), an award-winning rewriting of “Red Riding Hood.” While Wolf presents Nan, the counterpart of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, as a determined and cunning older woman at first, in the course of the novel, the narrative lapses into the ageist stereotypes of the ineffectual crone and the wise old mentor

Research in Action: Constructing Age for Young Readers

Children's literature studies has been relatively slow in adopting techniques from digital humanities. This article explains a method for digitising, annotating, and analysing texts in xml to investigate the implicit age norms that children's books convey. The case studies are seventeen books by Bart Moeyaert and La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman. The analysis of speech distribution, topic modelling, syntactic parsing, and lexical analysis with digital tools adds information about implicit age norms that can support and inspire narrative analyses with close reading

Constructing Age in Children’s Literature: A Digital Approach to Guus Kuijer’s Oeuvre

This article applies digital methods to gain more insight into the role of age in the oeuvre of the Dutch author Guus Kuijer. The concept of “age” is relevant to Kuijer’s oeuvre in various ways: he is a crosswriter who has authored fiction for children, adolescents, and adults, and intergenerational relationships are a recurrent thematic feature in his work. Since discussions on age in his works have so far been limited to case-based research, this article offers a fuller understanding of the role that age plays in Kuijer’s oeuvre, in particular the explicit and implicit age norms that his books offer and the extent to which the age category of the intended reader determines the form and themes of Kuijer’s fiction. Kuijer’s juvenile literature is the prime place where he reflects on age. The negative and restrictive discourse about adulthood that has previously been addressed in selected titles (Joosen, Adulthood in Children's Literature), stretches out over his entire oeuvre. Both the analysis of implicit age norms in the vocabulary that the characters use as a consideration of those negative statements in context put that negativity into perspective, however. Moreover, reflections on childhood are also prominent in Kuijer's adult work, mostly to express sentiments about adult characters

“You Have to Set the Story You Know Aside”: Constructions of Youth, Adulthood and Senescence in Cinderella Is Dead

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