Jeunesse - Young People, Texts, Cultures (E-Journal)
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Comic Studies and Young People’s Cultures: The Challenges of Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue
Get PDFDOI: 10.1353/jeu.2014.001
The Girls Who Do Not Eat: Food, Hunger, and Thinness in Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls
No full textCritics have suggested that anorexia occurs frequently among middle-class and upper-middle-class adolescent girls. Going through a crucial stage of their development, they starve themselves voluntarily in times of plenty amid societal pressures to be thin. Published in the last decade, the two novels examined here serve as a locus for an analysis of this increasingly prevailing phenomenon and its connection to current social conditions. Drawing on food studies and on existing research on anorexia, this paper explores the significance of food, hunger, and thinness in both novels. Through its depiction of the protagonist’s experiences of genuine hunger and wartime scarcity, Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now urges a re-evaluation of familiar experiences of food and the prevailing views of thinness that are broadly accepted in societies of abundance. Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls presents a remarkable insight into a culture that encourages consumption and praises weight loss, revealing a pressing need for reform of both notions.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2014.000
Advertising the Self: The Culture of Personality in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web
No full textE. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web reflects the emergence of what Warren I. Susman has termed the “culture of personality.” This shift from an older culture of character to a newer culture of personality is thrown into sharp relief in the novel, which juxtaposes the bucolic Zuckerman farm against an emerging consumeristic society in which self-promotion has become necessary for success. While White acknowledges the need for confident self-promotion, he also interrogates the culture of personality, resurrecting aspects of the culture of character as a corrective to the competitive and egoistic norms of modern life.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2014.000
Remediating Tinker Bell: Exploring Childhood and Commodification through a Century-Long Transmedia Narrative
No full textThe one-hundred-year trajectory of the mischievous Tinker Bell, from J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up to the present-day Disney Fairies franchise, is a metanarrative of adaptation and remediation through which media and “childhood” can be seen to interrelate as mutually constitutive forces. With a focus on contemporary children’s narratives and media, this paper examines incarnations of this media franchise at fifty-year intervals. Our close reading yields insights into the reflexive relationship between the social constructions of childhood, the evolution of narrative in children’s literature, and the development of media for child audiences since the Edwardian era. Using Tinker Bell as an exemplar for a phenomenon, we find that as children’s narratives and media evolve in ways that increase the potential for childhood agency, commercial formulations shape this agency strategically by structuring access and participation.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2014.000
“We Are Masters at Childhood”: Time and Agency in Poetry by, for, and about Children
No full textThis essay considers a selection of poetry by, for, and about children in order to explore representations of time and agency. Reading poems across contexts of writers’ age-related social positions and audiences can illuminate poets’ strategies for representing children’s agency in and over time, since representations of time are infused with adult-child power relations. Only poems written by young people conveyed a conception of temporal agency that encompassed characters’ experiences of time as children. The essay concludes by proposing a notion of children’s temporal standpoints that incorporates agency at the levels of action and social role.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2013.001
