Constructing ‘Old’ Age for Young Readers: A Digital Approach

Abstract

Most literary scholars and age scholars have thus far relied on narrative analyses through close reading to comment on the age norms that books convey. This chapter explores what digital tools have to offer to support and enrich this type of analysis. The chapter focuses on children’s literature, a discourse that is defined by age and often thematizes intergenerational relationships and processes of growing up. After offering methodological reflections, it presents the results of a digital analysis of explicit and implicit age norms for older age in a corpus of 193 books by British, Dutch, and Flemish children’s authors. The scripts lay bare patterns that may escape human attention, such as the large number of explicit reflections on age or the substantial percentage of dialogue that older characters contribute to adult direct speech. The explicit reflections on older age are largely negative when isolated from context, but when supplemented with close readings they can direct researchers to debates about age that usually add nuance. The findings on the implicit age norms in direct speech in the corpus suggest that older characters speak more often in the past tense and about religion than young and other adult characters.