In the field of children’s literature studies, much attention has been devoted to investigating differences between children’s and adult literature. Works of crosswriters, authors who write for both readerships in different works, are an excellent source for this research. This article applies stylometry, the computational method of analysing style, to the oeuvres of 10 Dutch and English crosswriters to trace potential differences in their individual style and similarities between the authors. The analyses also take into account the age of the intended reader (as listed in the paratext) and the publication date, to study the influence these aspects have on writing style. Four case studies zoom in on a specific author or age category of the intended readership to study general tendencies as well as outliers. The results from the stylometric analyses are complemented with peritextual information about the author’s view on style and writing for readerships of different ages. The main conclusion drawn from the case studies is that the style of the texts usually correlates more strongly with the age of the intended reader than with the time period in which it was written. Young adult literature clusters more closely with adult literature. The style associated with a younger readership is distinct in the oeuvres of most authors studied in this article and even transcends the differences between authors.

When gender is brought into concerns about older people, the emphasis often lies on stereotypes connected to older women, and few comparative studies have been conducted pertaining to the representation of the intersection between older age and gender in fiction. This article argues that not only children’s literature, traditionally considered to be a carrier of ideology, plays a large part in the target readership’s age socialization, but so do young adult and adult fiction. In a large corpus of 41 Dutch books written for different ages, the representation of older men and women is studied through the verbs, grammatical possessions and adjectives associated with the relevant fictional characters, which were extracted from the texts through the computational method of dependency parsing. Older adult characters featured most frequently in fiction for adults, where, more so than in the books for younger readers, they are depicted as being prone to illness, experiencing the effects of a deteriorating body and having a limited social network. In the books for children, little to no association between older adulthood and mortality was found in the data. Ageist stereotypes pertaining to both genders were found throughout the corpus. In terms of characterization, male older adults are associated more with physicality, including matters of illness and mobility, while character traits and emotions show up in a more varied manner in connection to female older characters.

Compared to the large body of research into gender, race and class in children's literature, there has been little awareness of the social construction of age in this discourse. Analysing age in contemporary fiction for young readers gives insight in how present-day society models (people of) different ages, and given the decisive role that books play in shaping children's worldviews, such research contributes to our understanding of how age norms are passed on across generations. This article explores the construction of age in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter in relation to the age of the implied reader. This case study provides a unique opportunity to study age, because the main characters in every volume 'grow up' together with the implied readers. This article traces the correlation between the evolutions in form and content in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series on the one hand and an evolution in the age of its implied readership on the other. After scrutinising existing guidelines pertaining to the ideal age at which to read each book, we conduct our own digital analyses on the style and topics of the texts. As well as providing insight into the evolution of these features in the Harry Potter books, this article contributes to the ongoing discussions on the reliability of readability measures and the desirability of explicit age markers on books for young readers.

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