ABSTRACT
This chapter applies a method of comparative literary analysis through close reading to reflect on Almond as a crosswriter, and thus supplements the digital analyses on David Almond’s characterisation and style from Chapter 3. As Zohar Shavit has demonstrated in The Poetics of Children’s Literature with Roald Dahl as a case study, narratives by the same author that recycle material and are published for children and for adults, are interesting to study. They can form the basis for a deeper reflection on the distinction between children’s literature and adult literature. This chapter uses a similar method as Shavit but comes to a different conclusion, taking not the constraints of children’s literature as its framework, but rather its possibilities. The analyses start by discussing the similarities between the first two stories in Almond’s second collection of short stories for adults A Kind of Heaven (the eponymous story and “Fiesta”) on the one hand, and Almond’s children’s novel The Fire-Eaters (2003) on the other hand. It then performs a comparative close reading that takes into account various levels of the text, from words and sentences to larger themes, genre and social context. The final part of the chapter serves as a conclusion to the chapter and the monograph as a whole, reflecting on the insights from the different approaches to age in David Almond’s works and pointing towards avenues for further research.
