Second Childhoods and Intergenerational Dialogues: How Children’s Literature Studies and Age Studies Can Supplement Each Other

With the greying Western population, age studies is a booming interdisciplinary field that has many insights to offer for the study of children’s literature. I explore how age and intergenerational relationships are constructed in four contemporary British and Dutch children’s books. The analyses link the alliance that is created between the young and the old to four ageist tropes: narratives of decline, the infantilized senior, the disregard of the old body, and the wise old mentor. In addition, the article addresses a recurrent seesaw effect in the emancipation of the young and the elderly that downgrades the generation in between.