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Transgression vs the Politically Correct: Phases and Faces of a Core Category in Children’s Literature

Francesca Orestano    Università degli Studi di Milano, Italia    

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abstract

It seems that in recent years criticism has been eagerly focusing on ‘transgression’ and ‘transgressive’ as keywords that enlarge the epistemic horizon, allowing the scholar’s gaze to descry areas previously untouched, or explored with a different cultural bias. In the literary domain, as an intentional act that involves trespassing, and the breaking of rules performed in explicit ways, transgression is often linked to language and form, and also to questions of gender, politics, social behaviour. The following articles, while dwelling on transgression, locate it within the area of children’s fiction, thus operating a first preliminary transgression, inasmuch as this kind of literature has been traditionally moulded by the romantic and pastoral fallacy of childhood as an innocent, untainted, happy condition, and, in turn, by the Victorian cult of the child that thrived on aesthetically idealized representations of childhood and youth, teeming with sound moral principles, healthy didacticism, excellent examples of virtue.

Pubblicato
16 Marzo 2022
Lingua
EN
Copyright: © 2021 Francesca Orestano. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.