Adulthood in Children's Literature

While most scholars who study childrens 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 childrens literature. Adulthood in Childrens 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 childrens 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 childrens literature by focusing not on the child but the adult.