ABSTRACT
The first years of the new millennium have been miraculous ones for crossover literature, books and films that cross from child to adult audiences or vice versa. Cross-writing includes authors who write sometimes for children and sometimes for adults, as well as writers who address more than one age of reader/viewer in the same text. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children contains large sections about children, though not addressed to them nor, historically, read in large numbers by them. The idea that identity is dialogically constructed, always the product of a confluence of voices, is essential for any theoretical account of crossover literature. The concept of heteroglossia offers flexible, nuanced ways of accounting for the relation between child and adult discourses. By the mid-1970s, chronotopic spaces were more often the ground for gritty, even brutalising, social realism. Concerns about the appropriateness of ‘adult material’ in children’s books is also recurrently voiced in discussions of children’s social realist fiction.
