University Press of Mississippi Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film (Children's Literature Association Series)

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. About the Author 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 Sk?éodowska-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 and coauthor of Lewis Carroll's Alice: A Publishing History.