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.

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. Moreover, the authors explore what different theories and methods can be used to study age in children’s literature, and what their affordances and limits are. The analyses combine age studies with life writing studies, cognitive narratology, digital humanities, comparative literary studies, reader-response research and media studies. To ensure coherence, the book offers an in-depth exploration of the oeuvre of a single author, David Almond. The aesthetic and thematic richness of Almond’s works has been widely recognised. This book adds to the understanding of his oeuvre by offering a multi-faceted analysis of age. In addition to discussing the film adaptation of his best-known novel Skellig, this book also offers analyses of works that have received less attention, such as Counting Stars, Clay and Bone Music. Readers will also get a fuller understanding of Almond as a crosswriter of literature for children, adolescents and adults.

Media narratives in popular culture often assign interchangeable characteristics to childhood and old age, presuming a resemblance between children and the elderly. These designations in media can have far-reaching repercussions in shaping not only language, but also cognitive activity and behavior. The meaning attached to biological, numerical age-even the mere fact that we calculate a numerical age at all-is culturally determined, as is the way people "act their age." With populations aging all around the world, awareness of intergenerational relationships and associations surrounding old age is becoming urgent. Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media caters to this urgency and contributes to age literacy by supplying insights into the connection between childhood and senescence to show that people are aged by culture. Treating classic stories like the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales and Heidi; pop culture hits like The Simpsons and Mad Men; and international productions, such as Turkish television cartoons and South Korean films, contributors explore the recurrent idea that "children are like old people," as well as other relationships between children and elderly characters as constructed in literature and media from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This volume deals with fiction and analyzes language as well as verbally sparse, visual productions, including children's literature, film, television, animation, and advertising.

Media narratives in popular culture often assign interchangeable characteristics to childhood and old age, presuming a resemblance between children and the elderly. These designations in media can have far-reaching repercussions in shaping not only language, but also cognitive activity and behavior. The meaning attached to biological, numerical age-even the mere fact that we calculate a numerical age at all-is culturally determined, as is the way people "act their age." With populations aging all around the world, awareness of intergenerational relationships and associations surrounding old age is becoming urgent. Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media caters to this urgency and contributes to age literacy by supplying insights into the connection between childhood and senescence to show that people are aged by culture. Treating classic stories like the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales and Heidi; pop culture hits like The Simpsons and Mad Men; and international productions, such as Turkish television cartoons and South Korean films, contributors explore the recurrent idea that "children are like old people," as well as other relationships between children and elderly characters as constructed in literature and media from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This volume deals with fiction and analyzes language as well as verbally sparse, visual productions, including children's literature, film, television, animation, and advertising. Contributions by Goekce Elif Baykal, Lincoln Geraghty, Veronica Gottau, Vanessa Joosen, Sung-Ae Lee, Cecilia Lindgren, Mayako Murai, Emily Murphy, Mariano Narodowski, Johanna Sjoeberg, Anna Sparrman, Ingrid Tomkowiak, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer, Ilgim Veryeri Alaca, and Elisabeth Wesseling.

Grimms' fairy tales are among the best-known stories in the world, but the way they have been introduced into and interpreted by cultures across the globe has varied enormously. In Grimms' Tales around the Globe, editors Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey bring together scholars from Asia, Europe and North and Latin America to investigate the international reception of the Grimms' tales. The essays in this volume offer insights into the social and literary role of the tales in a number of countries and languages, finding aspects that are internationally constant as well as locally particular. In the first section, "Cultural Resistance and Assimilation", contributors consider the global history of the reception of the Grimms' tales in a range of cultures. In these eight chapters, scholars explore how cunning translators and daring publishers around the world reshaped and rewrote the tales, incorporating them into existing fairy-tale traditions, inspiring new writings and often introducing new uncertainties of meaning into the already ambiguous stories. Contributors in the second part, "Reframings, Paratexts, and Multimedia Translations", shed light on how the Grimms' tales were affected by intermedial adaptation when travelling abroad. These six chapters focus on illustrations, manga and film and television adaptations. In all, contributors take a wide view of the tales' history in a range of locales - including Poland, China, Croatia, India, Japan and France. Grimms' Tales around the Globe shows that the tales, with their paradox between the universal and the local and their long and world-spanning translation history, form a unique and exciting corpus for the study of reception. Fairy-tale and folklore scholars as well as readers interested in literary history and translation will appreciate this enlightening volume.

In Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings Vanessa Joosen broadens the traditional concept of intertextuality to include academic texts. With three key texts from the 1970s at the center of her discussion-Marcia K. Lieberman's "Some Day My Prince Will Come," Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic-Joosen connects the critical views expressed in these feminist and psychoanalytic interpretations with fictional fairy-tale retellings and illustrations that have been published in Dutch, English, and German since the 1970s. While readers may not automatically connect fairy-tale retellings and criticism, Joosen argues that they represent a similar conviction to understand, interpret, criticize, and experiment with the original tale. Moving through her three critical focus texts in chronological order, Joosen addresses fairy-tale retellings in prose, poetry, and pictures, including revisions of "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Hansel and Gretel," "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Beauty and the Beast." Authors and illustrators whose work is discussed include Paul Biegel, Anthony Browne, Gillian Cross, Emma Donoghue, Iring Fetscher, Adele Geras, Otto Gmelin, Wim Hofman, Anne Provoost, Anne Sexton, Barbara Walker, and Jane Yolen. Joosen argues that retellings and criticism participate in a continuous and dynamic dialogue about the traditional fairy tale, but on different terms. Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales offers many insights into the workings of fiction and criticism that will appeal to fairy-tale scholars, literature scholars, and general readers interested in intertextuality and fairy tales.

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.

The varied collection of essays presented in this volume bridges the gap between continental and Anglo-American approaches to children's literature, and discuss the state of the art of what is topical in children's literature studies in Europe and the United States. Varied as the different subject areas under discussion are, considering different subgenres, historical periods, and geographical contexts, two main themes surface in nearly all the essays: ideology and children's literature on the one hand, and images of childhood on the other.The contributions illustrate the wide range of subject areas and the increasing level of sophistication with which criticism of ideology and Cultural Studies have enriched children's literature criticism. The essays address, among others, the influence of globalisation and mass market culture on the production of children's books, as well as the choices governing the production of translations and adaptations of texts for young readers. Representing a broad array of methodological approaches and of representations of childhood, this publication intends to render visible actual manifestations of the tension between pedagogy and aesthetics, inherent to and constitutive of children's literature.