Abstract
Children’s literature is inextricably bound up with notions of power. Where the self-determining, agential child has been a favorite of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century authors, such self-determination and subjective agency rarely topple the adult institutions under whose aegis children’s lives are minutely controlled and supervised. What happens when the world adults leave their children is beset by environmental calamity, and the child’s potential to undertake future action is limited by the possibility that there may not be a viable future for them to inherit? This chapter argues that children’s books need to explore new subject positions and look to new environmental subjectivities cognizant of the problems today’s children have inherited and deeply aware of the challenges that lie ahead.
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Curry, A. (2020). The Power and Potential: An Ecocritical Reading of Twenty-First-Century Childhood. In: op de Beeck, N. (eds) Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_12
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