Connecting Generations, Connecting Disciplines: Intergenerational (Im)Possibilities in Popular Media

The third publication to emerge from the Platform for a Cultural History of Children's Media (PLACIM), Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media sets out to illuminate the metaphor of resemblance that pervades constructions of childhood and old age and to explore what role children's media might play in fostering intergenerational understanding and solidarity. Comprising twelve chapters and an introduction, the volume focuses on representations of relationships between children and the elderly in both Western and East Asian contexts. Contributors to the volume focus primarily on representations in books, film, and television; rather than creating separate sections for each medium, the book clusters discussions of similar media together to enhance the flow of the volume as a whole. The resulting volume sits at the intersection of several current trends in the field of children's literature and culture—the reappraisal of the adult as both construct and potential reader; the extension of the field's theoretical frameworks and understandings to other children's media forms; the desire for a more global understanding of our field and its subject—each of which is drafted into the service of the volume's exploration of intergenerational relationships and dynamics.

The introduction opens on a discussion of the United Kingdom's 2016 vote in favour of leaving the European Union; editor Vanessa Joosen explores how, in the aftermath of the vote, public debate quickly became dominated by narratives of intergenerational competition that betray a larger tendency toward ageism (3). As Joosen, notes, while the majority of British voters under twenty-four voted to "Remain," 58% of voters over sixty-five voted "Leave," creating feelings of intergenerational rivalry and jealously that saw elderly "Leave" voters frequently portrayed in the press as "selfish usurpers of the means that younger generations should be entitled to" (3). As the elderly come to constitute an ever-growing percentage of the population across the globe, Joosen asserts that there is a growing need to rethink how we represent and understand old age, to become "agewise" (Gullette, Agewise). Drawing from the fields of anthropology, sociology, childhood studies, pedagogy, media studies, and film studies, the contributors to Connecting Childhood and Old Age pursue this goal, tracing how the "root metaphor" (Lakoff and Johnson) of similarity between the very young and the very old manifests in children's media culture at large so as to better understand what role children's media can play in facilitating intergenerational solidarity.

Joosen has done much in the last few years to bring concepts from the field of age studies to bear upon the practice of children's literary criticism. As she observes in her 2015 article, "Second Childhoods and Intergenerational Dialogues: How Children's Literature Studies and Age Studies Can Supplement Each Other," scholars of both children's literature and age studies "start from the same constructivist approach to age" (127). Whereas children's literary criticism has made it its mission to show how children's fiction constructs ideas of childhood and the asymmetry of power by which this process is underpinned, age critics use research from fields such as biology, gerontology, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies to explore how different life stages acquire different meanings in specific socio-historical contexts. Contemporary age critics share with scholars of children's literature an interest in the way individuals are "aged by culture"—a term coined by Margaret Morganroth Gullette, whose research, alongside that of Susan Neiman and of Jenny Hockney and Allison James, serves as a key critical touchstone for the contributors to Connecting Childhood and Old Age. Central to Gullette's research is the notion that the stories we tell about different stages of life, "whatever else they do, tell the meaning of time passing" (Aged by Culture 12-13). In her introduction, Joosen demonstrates how the stories that we have told about the very young and the very old have a history of mapping the behaviours...