Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film
Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film
Winner of the 2023 Edited Book Award from the International Research Society for Children’s Literature
Contributions by Aneesh Barai, Clémentine Beauvais, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Terri Doughty, Aneta Dybska, Blanka Grzegorczyk, Zoe Jaques, Vanessa Joosen, Maria Nikolajeva, Marek Oziewicz, Ashley N. Reese, Malini Roy, Sabine Steels, Lucy Stone, Björn Sundmark, Michelle Superle, Nozomi Uematsu, Anastasia Ulanowicz, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer, and Jean Webb
Intergenerational solidarity is a vital element of societal relationships that ensures survival of humanity. It connects generations, fostering transfer of common values, cumulative knowledge, experience, and culture essential to human development. In the face of global aging, changing family structures, family separations, economic insecurity, and political trends pitting young and old against each other, intergenerational solidarity is now, more than ever, a pressing need.
Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film argues that productions for young audiences can stimulate intellectual and emotional connections between generations by representing intergenerational solidarity. For example, one essayist focuses on Disney films, which have shown a long-time commitment to variously highlighting, and then conservatively healing, fissures between generations. However, Disney-Pixar’s Up and Coco instead portray intergenerational alliances—young collaborating with old, the living working alongside the dead—as necessary to achieving goals.
The collection also testifies to the cultural, social, and political significance of children’s culture in the development of generational intelligence and empathy towards age-others and positions the field of children’s literature studies as a site of intergenerational solidarity, opening possibilities for a new socially consequential inquiry into the culture of childhood.
Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film takes advantage of the opportunity to be not only a powerful gathering of readings, but also an intersectional accomplishment in advocacy for a generational intelligence that offers hope for a more profound understanding of the complex relationships established between children and adults.
The essays offer a variety of approaches and should be of interest to scholars in the field of children’s literature.
[Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film] offers an exciting and intriguing contribution to the understanding of intergenerational relationships in children’s fiction. . . . The critical need for intergenerational solidarity has never been more apparent, a fact the collection asserts in the introduction, and which is threaded throughout the chapters.
Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film significantly intervenes in conversations about adult-child relationships in important ways, making an optimistic and hopeful case for the instrumentality of children’s culture as a response to social and cultural conditions that threaten to alienate generations. The rich international context provides a valuable example in how to continue to move toward a more global understanding of the fields of children’s literature and childhood studies.
The range of topics in Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film is very impressive indeed, and the distribution of essays across five sections—historical perspectives, alliances in contemporary narratives, intergenerational memory, intergenerational projects, and intergenerational collaboration/coauthorship—constitutes an excellent structure incorporating innovative and fascinating projects.
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak is associate professor of literature and director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wroclaw, Poland. She is author of Yes to Solidarity, No to Oppression: Radical Fantasy Fiction and Its Young Readers. She is a Kosciuszko, Fulbright, and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow. She has served as a member of the board of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. Zoe Jaques is university senior lecturer in children’s literature at University of Cambridge. She is author of Children’s Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg and coauthor of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass”: A Publishing History.
