Taboo Teens and Ancient Adults: Overpopulation Motifs in Fictional Literature for Children and Young People

Literature for children and young people is uniquely positioned in terms of intended readership and literary genres such as the young adult dystopian novel to scrutinise intergenerational and human fertility issues associated with overpopulation. However, fictional texts that explore overpopulation have a narrative form that is unstable and unreliable due to prevailing conventions of subjectivity and optimism in children's and young adult literature. Derrida's last interview, Learning to Live, is pertinent to an understanding of motifs of overpopulation in literature for children and young people. Derrida's recognition of the ‘rights’ of future and present generations, and of the temporal intergenerational problems between parent as child, and child as parent, are explored in recent fictional texts for children and young people.