This seminar invites reflections on whether children’s literary expressions from the past can serve as a means of tracing children’s ‘voices.’ It is situated at the intersection of two central debates in children’s literature and childhood studies. The first pertains to the unequal power dynamic between adult authors and child readers. Scholars have demonstrated how literature for children is structured by adult authority, age-based norms, and ideological assumptions (Rose, 1984; Nodelman, 1992; Nikolajeva, 2010). Yet, as Rudd (2005) and Chapleau (2009) argue, children are not merely passive and powerless readers, but also active literary producers whose stories, songs, rhymes, jokes and other creative expressions can subvert, or reconfigure these adult-centric power dynamics.

Closely linked to this is the question of whether children’s literary expressions, particularly produced in the past can offer insights on children’s ‘voices.’ While scholars engaged in writing the history of childhood (Moruzi, Musgrove, Leahy, 2019), explore the methodological challenges of hearing children’s ‘voices’ across archival silences and adult-mediated records, proponents of constructivism (Oberstein, 2011) question the very notion of an authentic child’s ‘voice,’ emphasizing instead the discourses and processes through which children’s ‘voices’ are produced, mediated, and represented.

This seminar explores the contours of these debates by examining the conceptual, methodological and archival challenges involved in studying children’s literary expressions across various historical periods, geographical locations and disciplines. It invites participants to consider questions such as: How can children’s literary expressions deepen our understanding of children’s cultures, emotions, mentalities, and social worlds? How can child-authored texts produced in the past be accessed and interpreted? What methodological and analytical approaches are best suited to their study? What are the possibilities and limits of concepts such as ‘voice’ and ‘agency’?

Contributions may explore child-authored texts through sources, such as diaries, letters, autobiographical writings, school exercise books, examination papers, handwritten magazines, readers’ correspondence, contributions to newspapers and periodicals, essays, stories, poems, plays, songs, rhymes, riddles, jokes and scrapbooks.  

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

• Children’s writings as entry point into children’s cultures, emotions, mentalities, and everyday lives
• Children’s participation in literary, print, and public cultures
• Children as authors: genres, creativity, self-expression
• Children as readers: reading practices, reader responses
• Children’s literary communities: exchanges, networks, collaboration
• Editorial, pedagogical, familial, institutional mediation by adults
• Mimesis, performance, and negotiation of adult norms in children’s writing
• Children’s writings and the history of childhood