Abstract
Since the late 1960s, children's literature studies has developed into a vibrant field of research that unites literary, social and educational approaches to books for young readers (including fiction for adolescents). Over the same period, genetic criticism has grown into an area of study that surpasses traditional philology and text-critical analysis, focusing on the so-called avant-texte (documents preceding the publication of a literary work) as interesting literary material in its own right. To this date, the two fields of children's literature studies and genetic criticism have rarely engaged with each other. In this project, theoretically framed and in-depth genetic research is used to explore the construction of adolescence and the defining notion of the young addressee in the writing process of children's books. The project also pays attention the collaborative process that precedes the publication of a book for young reader – a process that always involves gatekeepers such as publishers, and sometimes also graphic designers and young readers themselves. It focuses on a canonical, particularly challenging author who has been both lauded and criticized for his approach to adolescent literature: Aidan Chambers. This British author won the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2002 for his experimental approach to adolescent fiction. Chambers' Dance series (1978-2005), named after its best known title Dance On My Grave (1982), is considered a milestone. For this project, selected items from Chambers' notebooks, sources, manuscripts, typescripts and correspondence are transcribed and digitized. The researchers involved reconstruct and interpret the writing process of Aidan Chambers' Dance series, thus contributing to a better understanding of this seminal author's adolescent fiction. In doing so, they aim to supplement the field of children's studies with state-of-the-art approaches from genetic criticism, including tools from digital humanities, in order to get a better understanding of the creative processes of adolescent fiction in particular, and vice versa, to introduce the aspect of "age" (including the author's own age and the concept of the "young addressee") to genetic criticism. Finally, they also develop practice-based methodological reflections on doing genetic research with a living author. Chambers' writing process will be visualized and studied with Manuscript Web, a digital scholarly editing platform developed at the University of Antwerp to accommodate the needs of genetic editions, allowing the editor to process and visualize not only the scans and transcriptions of draft materials, but also the intricate relations between those documents. By plotting out genetic pathways between different types of documents (like personal library items, notebooks, manuscripts, or published versions), the user can follow the progression of the text as it developed over time. At the end of the project, an online, educational manual will be developed to help teachers and secondary-school pupils navigate the genetic edition of Chamers' works, raise their textual awareness and critical reading skills, and add further depth to their understanding of Chambers' books and children's literature in general.
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