Although literary scholars must take heed of drawing simplistic parallels between authors’ lives and their fictional works, writers rely on experiences from real life as the context and inspiration for their works. Scholars in age studies have noted that authors sometimes turn to the subject of old age when they grow old themselves, or that they a…[Read more]

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. Their experimental narrative forms include a complex chronology, unreliable narrator, dream scenes, gaps, and a rich intertextual network to frame an intergenerational friendship that…[Read more]

Is er een leeftijdsgrens voor jeugdschrijvers? Als 89-jarige zei Jan Terlouw dat hij stopt met kinderboeken schrijven. De uitspraak leidde tot protest. Kun je alleen jonge lezers bekoren als je zelf dicht genoeg bij je kindertijd staat? En wat is dicht genoeg? Hoe oud is jong?

Vanessa Joosen bestudeert jeugdboeken sinds 2001. Met dit essay wil…[Read more]

In recent decades, age studies has started to emerge as a new approach to study children’s literature. This book builds on that scholarship but also significantly extends it by exploring age in various aspects of children’s literature: the age of the author, the characters, the writing style, the intended readership and the real reader. Mor…[Read more]

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 cha…[Read more]

Diverging definitions and uses of concepts such as “ageism,” “aetonormativity,” “adultism,” and “childism” point at the relative separateness of the fields of childhood studies, age studies, and children’s literature studies, while also highlighting their shared interest in questions of age, prejudice, and agency. This article uses John Wall’s…[Read more]

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 nov…[Read more]

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 featu…[Read more]

In the field of children’s literature studies, much attention has been devoted to investigating differences between children’s and adult literature. Works of crosswriters, authors who write for both readerships in different works, are an excellent source for this research. This article applies stylometry, the computational method of analysing sty…[Read more]

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 a…[Read more]

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…[Read more]