DI COSA PARLANO I LIBRI PER BAMBINI. La letteratura per l’infanzia come critica radicale. [What Children’s Books Are About. Children’s Literature as Radical Critique.] By Giorgia Grilli.

In her latest volume published in 2021, Giorgia Grilli, Associate Professor of Children’s Literature and History of Illustration for Children at the University of Bologna and co-founder of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature (CRLI) of the Department of Education «Giovanni Maria Bertin», discusses several novels and picturebooks for children, both classical and contemporary, focusing on their deep, implicit meaning, their metaphors and poetic images, which lie below and beyond their explicit content, their conscious and deliberate author’s message. Rounded off by numerous illustrations and photographs, Di cosa parlano i libri per bambini lies on a premise, which the author emphasises throughout her work: great books for children are subversive and have no clear, explicit or hypersocial lesson to teach. In these books we usually find enlightening metaphors of childhood (a wild thing, a hybrid creature…) which contribute to object stereotyped and watered-down visions of it, showing this stage in life as anything but idyllic and ideal, but rather as, in its core, melancholy, uncanny, difficult, disturbing, and in some respects also “monstrous”. Drawing from different disciplines – from cultural anthropology to philosophy, from evolutionary to educational theories, from literary criticism to illustration and cinema – Grilli’s work also highlights that children’s literature rises from an ancestral vocation to tell stories which remind us of our human but not-only-human origins. It is not without reason that children’s books which critics agree are international classics were written just at the time or right after The Origin of Species by British naturalist Charles Darwin was published (1859).