Nonfiction

The following chapter presents a short exploration of Nonfiction: its definition, an outline of its history and development, the issue of whether a literary/artistic form or merely a corpus of books providing useful information. In an attempt to reflect on quality Nonfiction for children, special attention is devoted to its ‘pictorial turn’ (Merveldt 2018) during the XXI century, and especially to the new nonfiction picturebook. A thriving international publishing phenomenon, the nonfiction picturebook is an imaginative, deviceful, multifaceted product whose aesthetic sophistication is crucial to the communication of knowledge, with the result that Nonfiction is, more clearly than ever today, an integral part of children’s ‘literature’, i.e., an object of beauty as well as an informative tool, a creative as well as instructional endeavor.