Storytelling as intergenerational connection: Challenging ageism through metafiction in recent writing for young people

Metafiction and representations of storytelling in texts for young people typically emphasise the young protagonists’ abilities to find agency by using reading and writing to question adult authority, to rebel against adult hegemony, and to learn how to gain a measure of control over their own life stories. Whilst such metafictional texts can help to renegotiate limiting discourses of childhood, they can simultaneously function to reinforce generalisations of adulthood that foreground intergenerational conflict and other ageist sentiment, thus limiting the subversive potential of these texts. Novels that engage adult storytellers as central characters can, however, create space for more nuanced stories of age and aging. Through an analysis of metafictional strategies in Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart (translated 2003), Geraldine McCaughrean’s A Pack of Lies (1988), and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2006), this paper shows that challenging the pejorative juxtaposition between the creative, imaginative child and the largely absent, unimaginative adult, creates space for a broader re-evaluation of limiting discourses of age.