Knowledge Commons | Vanessa Joosen | Activity https://hcommons.org/members/vjoosen/activity/ Activity feed for Vanessa Joosen. Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:43:54 -0400 https://buddypress.org/?v=10.6.0 en-US 30 hourly 2 c5771d55b1e48310389e91200fd99f6c Vanessa Joosen deposited ‘What's the point of grandpa?’ Grandparents in Children's Literature in the group Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1879777/ Mon, 18 Mar 2024 03:02:06 -0400 This chapter discusses grandparent figures in contemporary Western children’s literature by reflecting on their functions in the plot and on their construction in relationship to discourses on old age in society at large. The case studies draw from Flemish, Dutch and British children’s literature, and the analyses are framed with theories from age…[Read more]

]]> 0 c5771d55b1e48310389e91200fd99f6c Vanessa Joosen deposited ‘What's the point of grandpa?’ Grandparents in Children's Literature in the group Children's literature https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1879776/ Mon, 18 Mar 2024 03:02:06 -0400 This chapter discusses grandparent figures in contemporary Western children’s literature by reflecting on their functions in the plot and on their construction in relationship to discourses on old age in society at large. The case studies draw from Flemish, Dutch and British children’s literature, and the analyses are framed with theories from age…[Read more]

]]> 0 9ef760a699fc8b4be935403350f33ecf Vanessa Joosen deposited ‘What's the point of grandpa?’ Grandparents in Children's Literature https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1879755/ Sun, 17 Mar 2024 18:53:08 -0400 This chapter discusses grandparent figures in contemporary Western children’s literature by reflecting on their functions in the plot and on their construction in relationship to discourses on old age in society at large. The case studies draw from Flemish, Dutch and British children’s literature, and the analyses are framed with theories from age…[Read more]

]]> 0 d778a2bb2632d70be217e57d99c8be65 Vanessa Joosen deposited Children's literature: young readers, older authors https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1858983/ Tue, 19 Sep 2023 16:27:37 -0400 Although literary scholars must take heed of drawing simplistic parallels between authors’ lives and their fictional works, writers rely on experiences from real life as the context and inspiration for their works. Scholars in age studies have noted that authors sometimes turn to the subject of old age when they grow old themselves, or that they a…[Read more]

]]> 0 e10b171aecdf86f12d95d4501a2f4682 Vanessa Joosen deposited Hoe oud is jong? Leeftijd in jeugdliteratuur in the group Children's literature https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1854427/ Thu, 10 Aug 2023 01:08:13 -0400 Is er een leeftijdsgrens voor jeugdschrijvers? Als 89-jarige zei Jan Terlouw dat hij stopt met kinderboeken schrijven. De uitspraak leidde tot protest. Kun je alleen jonge lezers bekoren als je zelf dicht genoeg bij je kindertijd staat? En wat is dicht genoeg? Hoe oud is jong?

Vanessa Joosen bestudeert jeugdboeken sinds 2001. Met dit essay wil…[Read more]

]]> 0 3ac5dea2f140a5c4a3e815d958efae4c Vanessa Joosen deposited Holding Hands: Intergenerational Desire in Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock and Ali Smith's Autumn https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1854314/ Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:29:53 -0400 Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock (1984) and Ali Smith's Autumn (2016) are two British novels that evoke an intense friendship between a girl and an older man. Their experimental narrative forms include a complex chronology, unreliable narrator, dream scenes, gaps, and a rich intertextual network to frame an intergenerational friendship that…[Read more]

]]> 0 ff86eeaf87fdcaf515935d5b829031c1 Vanessa Joosen deposited Hoe oud is jong? Leeftijd in jeugdliteratuur https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1854312/ Wed, 09 Aug 2023 09:48:25 -0400 Is er een leeftijdsgrens voor jeugdschrijvers? Als 89-jarige zei Jan Terlouw dat hij stopt met kinderboeken schrijven. De uitspraak leidde tot protest. Kun je alleen jonge lezers bekoren als je zelf dicht genoeg bij je kindertijd staat? En wat is dicht genoeg? Hoe oud is jong?

Vanessa Joosen bestudeert jeugdboeken sinds 2001. Met dit essay wil…[Read more]

]]> 0 8d68f846592e990a8edef6357c3e76b6 Vanessa Joosen created the group Children's literature https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1854301/ Wed, 09 Aug 2023 07:56:17 -0400 0 05e15f2711d8d698d256937b1f99a5ad Vanessa Joosen deposited Age in David Almond’s Oeuvre: A Multi-Method Approach to Studying Age and the Life Course in Children’s Literature in the group Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1854294/ Wed, 09 Aug 2023 01:08:48 -0400 In recent decades, age studies has started to emerge as a new approach to study children’s literature. This book builds on that scholarship but also significantly extends it by exploring age in various aspects of children’s literature: the age of the author, the characters, the writing style, the intended readership and the real reader. Mor…[Read more]

]]> 0 f418db860489f53eb3e9f4727dd92cc5 Vanessa Joosen deposited Age in David Almond’s Oeuvre: A Multi-Method Approach to Studying Age and the Life Course in Children’s Literature https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1854248/ Tue, 08 Aug 2023 15:36:04 -0400 In recent decades, age studies has started to emerge as a new approach to study children’s literature. This book builds on that scholarship but also significantly extends it by exploring age in various aspects of children’s literature: the age of the author, the characters, the writing style, the intended readership and the real reader. Mor…[Read more]

]]> 0 76b35e5b130a82fd63f8be02d36ba36f Vanessa Joosen deposited Encounters of a Dreamy Kind: Dreams as Spaces for Intergenerational Play and Healing in Dutch Children's Literature in the group Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1846885/ Tue, 23 May 2023 02:23:49 -0400 Dreams can function in children’s books as a means to connect young characters and
older figures in the story. This article presents three methods to study intergenerational
encounters in and through dreams in a selection of contemporary Dutch children’s
books. First, a digital analysis of a corpus of 81 books shows that the older the cha…[Read more]

]]> 0 c1931452a4235982ecae0b9d486b9f03 Vanessa Joosen deposited Connecting Childhood Studies, Age Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies: John Wall’s Concept of Childism and Anne Fine’s The Granny Project in the group Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1846884/ Tue, 23 May 2023 02:23:44 -0400 Diverging definitions and uses of concepts such as “ageism,” “aetonormativity,” “adultism,” and “childism” point at the relative separateness of the fields of childhood studies, age studies, and children’s literature studies, while also highlighting their shared interest in questions of age, prejudice, and agency. This article uses John Wall’s…[Read more]

]]> 0 1c47f368c7652f9e7f9bb328123fc8ad Vanessa Joosen deposited Encounters of a Dreamy Kind: Dreams as Spaces for Intergenerational Play and Healing in Dutch Children's Literature https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1846825/ Mon, 22 May 2023 15:14:02 -0400 Dreams can function in children’s books as a means to connect young characters and
older figures in the story. This article presents three methods to study intergenerational
encounters in and through dreams in a selection of contemporary Dutch children’s
books. First, a digital analysis of a corpus of 81 books shows that the older the cha…[Read more]

]]> 0 623f0caa88431a793141816cf829ab94 Vanessa Joosen deposited Connecting Childhood Studies, Age Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies: John Wall’s Concept of Childism and Anne Fine’s The Granny Project https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1846814/ Mon, 22 May 2023 14:34:56 -0400 Diverging definitions and uses of concepts such as “ageism,” “aetonormativity,” “adultism,” and “childism” point at the relative separateness of the fields of childhood studies, age studies, and children’s literature studies, while also highlighting their shared interest in questions of age, prejudice, and agency. This article uses John Wall’s…[Read more]

]]> 0 312309e2e6274a98aed7ddbaeea9a046 Vanessa Joosen started the topic CFP LIon and the Unicorn - Special issue on children's literature and DH in the discussion Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/groups/childrens-literature-and-digital-humanities/forum/topic/cfp-lion-and-the-unicorn-special-issue-on-childrens-literature-and-dh/ Wed, 18 Jan 2023 15:47:04 -0500 Call for PapersChildren’s Literature and Digital HumanitiesSpecial issue The Lion and the Unicorn In recent years, Digital Humanities has had a big impact on the field of literary studies as a whole and digital approaches are now also making their way to children’s literature studies. Moreover, various large digitisation projects have made mor…[Read more]

]]> 0b6183abaa9704a8ca48cae2bdd74de1 Vanessa Joosen deposited Constructing Age in Children’s Literature: A Digital Approach to Guus Kuijer’s Oeuvre in the group Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1773096/ Fri, 25 Feb 2022 02:24:50 -0500 This article applies digital methods to gain more insight into the role of age in the oeuvre of the Dutch author Guus Kuijer. The concept of “age” is relevant to Kuijer’s oeuvre in various ways: he is a crosswriter who has authored fiction for children, adolescents, and adults, and intergenerational relationships are a recurrent thematic featu…[Read more]

]]> 0 134e6515136a6ba462fa7330fcb94fdf Vanessa Joosen deposited “You Have to Set the Story You Know Aside”: Constructions of Youth, Adulthood and Senescence in Cinderella Is Dead https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1772931/ Thu, 24 Feb 2022 16:20:14 -0500 As with other twenty-first-century rewritings of fairytales, Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron complicates the classic ‘Cinderella’ fairytale narrative popularized by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm for new audiences, queering and race-bending the tale in its decidedly feminist revision of the story. However, as we argue here, the nov…[Read more]

]]> 0 906e35200c0349a47d9ab1b856f7ce1a Vanessa Joosen deposited Constructing Age in Children’s Literature: A Digital Approach to Guus Kuijer’s Oeuvre https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1772927/ Thu, 24 Feb 2022 16:08:23 -0500 This article applies digital methods to gain more insight into the role of age in the oeuvre of the Dutch author Guus Kuijer. The concept of “age” is relevant to Kuijer’s oeuvre in various ways: he is a crosswriter who has authored fiction for children, adolescents, and adults, and intergenerational relationships are a recurrent thematic featu…[Read more]

]]> 0 8afe5ddcca04b35bf387c8d80d6c5285 Vanessa Joosen deposited A style for every age: A stylometric inquiry into crosswriters for children, adolescents and adults in the group Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1768310/ Wed, 19 Jan 2022 02:23:38 -0500 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 sty…[Read more]

]]> 0 d20ab906a8f06c69b75c88054d291782 Vanessa Joosen deposited A style for every age: A stylometric inquiry into crosswriters for children, adolescents and adults https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1768178/ Tue, 18 Jan 2022 13:12:18 -0500 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 sty…[Read more]

]]> 0 c70f56e6888dbfd60e028fbfe33c091d Vanessa Joosen deposited Writing when Young: Bart Moeyaert as a Young Adult Author in the group Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1760807/ Tue, 07 Dec 2021 02:37:45 -0500 Duet met valse noten (1983) started as a diary when Bart Moeyaert was twelve years old. After it was disclosed by an older brother, Moeyaert rewrote it during his teenage years as a novel about first love. This article studies the genesis and early reception of Moeyaert’s novel to reflect on young authors who fictionalize real-life experiences a…[Read more]

]]> 0 bd9c21752f7b4050ebe9fe47f74b0dc4 Vanessa Joosen deposited Writing when Young: Bart Moeyaert as a Young Adult Author https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1760749/ Mon, 06 Dec 2021 21:34:33 -0500 Duet met valse noten (1983) started as a diary when Bart Moeyaert was twelve years old. After it was disclosed by an older brother, Moeyaert rewrote it during his teenage years as a novel about first love. This article studies the genesis and early reception of Moeyaert’s novel to reflect on young authors who fictionalize real-life experiences a…[Read more]

]]> 0 2742cc9e403f6a2ae3df18b7bbba5321 Vanessa Joosen deposited Research in Action: Constructing Age for Young Readers https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1752098/ Thu, 16 Sep 2021 10:14:28 -0400 Children's literature studies has been relatively slow in adopting techniques from digital humanities. This article explains a method for digitising, annotating, and analysing texts in xml to investigate the implicit age norms that children's books convey. The case studies are seventeen books by Bart Moeyaert and La Belle Sauvage by Philip…[Read more]

]]> 0 198f6a6b023097b8a6ca5f839d695b44 Vanessa Joosen deposited Rewriting the Grandmother’s Story: Old Age in “Little Red Riding Hood” and Gillian Cross’ Wolf in the group Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1744583/ Fri, 02 Jul 2021 02:23:38 -0400 Abstract: Feminist perspectives have strongly influenced the fairy-tale rewritings of the past decades, but the intersection of gender with other identity markers deserves more attention. This article applies the conclusions of Sylvia Henneberg’s critical examination of age and gender in fairy tales to Gillian Cross’s Wolf (1990),
an awa…[Read more]

]]> 0 b5b60721ecc21faed1f32c651935773a Vanessa Joosen deposited Rewriting the Grandmother’s Story: Old Age in “Little Red Riding Hood” and Gillian Cross’ Wolf https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1744479/ Thu, 01 Jul 2021 09:53:09 -0400 Abstract: Feminist perspectives have strongly influenced the fairy-tale rewritings of the past decades, but the intersection of gender with other identity markers deserves more attention. This article applies the conclusions of Sylvia Henneberg’s critical examination of age and gender in fairy tales to Gillian Cross’s Wolf (1990),
an awa…[Read more]

]]> 0 1cb8f90d372512162da9752838835a8e Vanessa Joosen deposited Van kind naar kinship: De constructie van leeftijd in de literatuuropvattingen van Bart Moeyaert in de loop van zijn schrijverschap https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1738466/ Mon, 17 May 2021 07:38:33 -0400 Intergenerational dialogue is central to children’s literature. According to Marah Gubar, the relationship between childhood and adulthood can be cast in terms of difference, deficit (stressing what children do less well) and kinship. In the course of his writing career, the Flemish children’s author Bart Moeyaert evolved from a discourse of dif…[Read more]

]]> 0 27aeefa9463d8c4d7ab96fb65b33153d Vanessa Joosen deposited Bart Moeyaert as Writer, Author, Performer, and Public Figure: "That's Also What Literature Can Be" https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1718020/ Wed, 25 Nov 2020 08:35:14 -0500 Though only in his mid-fifties, Bart Moeyaert began his writing career over forty years ago, when at age thirteen. In the course of almost four decades as a published
author, Moeyaert’s views and writing practices have inevitably evolved. These developments can be attributed to personal experiences from living
through adolescence, young a…[Read more]

]]> 0 286dc606ac9de481fceccff9df0fddd8 Vanessa Joosen created the site Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1714109/ Thu, 05 Nov 2020 17:36:32 -0500 0 c432db35f477e8c870b6b4a00b9f98e6 Vanessa Joosen edited the doc Digital Archives in the group Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1714255/ Fri, 23 Oct 2020 08:48:32 -0400 2c03d964c25d768efe56c760f4970e5d Vanessa Joosen created the doc Digital Archives in the group Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1714254/ Fri, 23 Oct 2020 08:47:41 -0400 03a9019521887e21edcc8eb95b40b052 Vanessa Joosen created the group Children's literature and digital humanities https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1714110/ Thu, 22 Oct 2020 16:03:22 -0400 0 fa7f8f5d6763ae64ea5c8a1f16f57c70 Vanessa Joosen deposited Te kinderachtig voor de kinderen? Leeftijdsnormen in jeugdliteratuur digitaal onderzocht https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1708132/ Fri, 11 Sep 2020 13:31:25 -0400 In Ik ben Polleke, hoor! (2001) van Guus Kuijer zegt hoofdpersonage Polleke: ‘Ik wil best leuke dingen met Spiek doen, maar ik wil niet op hem passen. Hallo? Horen jullie me? Ik ben pas twaalf hoor!’ Door onder meer dit soort reflecties op leeftijd dragen jeugdboeken bij aan de constructie van leeftijdsnormen en daarmee aan de socialisatie van kin…[Read more]

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