Adulthood in Children's Literature by Vanessa Joosen (review)

The cover of Vanessa Joosen's 2018 Adulthood in Children's Literature features a picture of four children trying to have a sneak peek into their parents' bedroom through a giant keyhole surrounded by a wall. The illustration, taken from Marita De Sterck and An Candaele's picture book Koekeloeren (2008) and analyzed in the introduction, accurately captures the contents of Joosen's monograph. Adulthood in Children's Literature takes its readers on an unexpected and fascinating journey that helps them to better see how adulthood, a notion so familiar, yet a "blind space" of children literature, is framed and fashioned as a stage of life in books for the youngest readers. Moreover, Joosen shows how adulthood is performed by adult characters as well as communicated in various metareflections (7).

Joosen's careful analysis of dozens of critically acclaimed and popular novels and picture books by English, Dutch, and Flemish authors and illustrators published from 1970 for readers up to age twelve is rooted in her meticulous theoretical background. Joosen draws on both childhood studies and children's literature studies, but she mainly contextualizes her analysis with focuses on age studies and the claim that "age and the life course are socially constructed" (9). She uses verbal and visual markers of age, such as numerical age or words associated with specific stages of life, as well as social markers of adulthood. What I find especially remarkable about Joosen's research is that she does not use an unequivocally mimetic or semiotic approach while analyzing the construction of adulthood as it "is no more of a unified experience that childhood is" (16). Not denying that its representations are based on real experiences, Joosen highlights the importance of considering context, the role of narrative structures, genre conventions, and the didactic origin of children's literature. Despite the great number of books she has chosen to analyze, Joosen's selection of primary texts seems well-thought and effective, especially since she explicitly excludes adolescent and young adult books whose narratives are more focused on coming of age and becoming an adult, as well as popular texts not marketed as children's books.

The monograph consists of a detailed introduction where Joosen sets the theoretical frame for the six well-researched chapters. While often power dynamics in children's literature are reversed and "childhood and adulthood function as constructive others in studies of children's literature" (10), Joosen argues that it is crucial to approach adulthood in children's literature "as a fictional construct that may contribute to children's age socialization" (15). Furthermore, although the implied reader of the analyzed books is a child, they may provoke "an intergenerational dialogue that goes beyond the narratives themselves" (8). Hence, as Joosen notes, the adult reader can also be considered as a "learning subject," concerned with the conceptual and educational features of children's literature.

In the first chapter, Joosen elaborates on the role of adulthood in children's literature using Neil Postman's The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) and analyzing several books about the performance of various ages, such as Rachel Anderson's Paper Faces (1991) and Anthony Browne's The Big Baby (1993). In the following chapter, Joosen further explores the theme of adult protagonists in children's books, which "may offer role models, advice and even warnings for the adult readers" and "open up views of adulthood that are suppressed by dichotomies between childlike and adultlike features" (98). Adults in texts for young readers, as Joosen notes, are usually censored as they are perceived by child protagonists and play ideological roles—for example, the inclusion of adult characters of various ages may bring awareness of other stages of life, not only the "normative" middle adulthood, and make children more sympathetic with adult struggles.

In the opening chapter, Joosen also shows the difference in the depiction of the adult and the child body as "informing different kinds of social interactions between children and adults" (73). She investigates this theme in more detail in the fascinating third chapter...