Review of Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film

Abstract

Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Jaques’s edited collection Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film aims to intervene in discourses that see adults and children at odds with one another and thus children as relatively powerless in influencing and producing children’s culture. With a focus on literature and film specifically, the volume seeks to illuminate various ways in which children and adults have cooperated and continue to cooperate when producing children’s cultural texts, as well as the ways in which children’s texts encourage intergenerational solidarity. The volume opens with an introduction in which Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Jaques convincingly argue that we must pay closer attention to moments of intergenerational solidarity rather than to tensions between adults and children in and surrounding children’s texts. The body of the book is divided into five thematic parts. The first part, “Tradition of Interage Kinships in Children’s Books,” demonstrates that some children’s texts emphasize intergenerational cooperation. It opens with an incisive chapter by Clémentine Beauvais, who examines texts in which entire lives are depicted, including both biographies and other types of texts. Beauvais first reflects on what the lack of full lives in children’s literary texts means for intergenerationality, then considers how protagonists’ attitudes toward younger and older characters are depicted in the texts she examines, arguing that intergenerationality appears through protagonists’ being mentored when they are young themselves and then acting as mentors to children as they age. The second chapter, by Ashley N. Reese, presents a digital humanist examination of Pollyanna’s encouragement of intergenerational solidarity in Pollyanna (1913) and Pollyanna Grows Up (1915). Reese used the digital tool Voyant to produce word frequency graphs, word clouds, and word correlations, applying corpus techniques and close reading to the text in a “combinatorial” approach (20) in order to be able to closely consider uses of the word “glad” in the two texts, as well as what these uses demonstrate about intergenerational relationships in context. The third chapter in this section, by Björn Sundmark, considers reciprocal aid between adults and children in Astrid Lindgren’s Emil books. Sundmark argues that Lindgren questions normative hierarchies between adults and children, in part due to “changing perceptions of childhood in the Nordic countries” at the time she was writing (33).