Grandparents and Grandchildren in Children’s Literature: shared lives.

Abstract

This paper approaches the representation of elderly people in
children’s literature of the 21st century, focusing on the experiences shared among grandparents and grandchildren and how they build equalitary relationships. It examines the voices, the stories and the teachings of elderly people in these narratives, observing whether these subjects’ experiences are valued. In retrieving the social function of older people in children’s narratives, by means of remembering and also by the stories told, this text aims to reveal equalitary relationships between grandparents and grandchildren, which points to the co-education of different generations and the learning processes involving knowledges discarded by modernity.