Thinking with the Childadult: Children’s Literature and the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene, the notion of a new geological era marked by the impact of Western societies on the earth, challenges certain limitations of the human imagination, such as the ability to think beyond the human scale or the ability to appreciate non-human intelligence. Both children’s literature and the study of children’s literature need to address these challenges. This article suggests that it is the formal and stylistic strategies of children’s literature that are best suited to bridge the gap between Anthropocene and the ecological imagination. In order to consider the transformational potential of these strategies, this article proposes the rhetorical figure of the childadult, whose temporal multiplicity captures both the child-as-child reader and the future child-as-adult.