La letteratura per l'infanzia negli Stati Uniti

The essay investigates the status of chil­dren's literature in the United States from the 1850s onward. In particular, the author argues that young readers were included in, and then suddenly excluded from, literary discourse as the arbiters of culture shifted from the edi­torial boards of famous journals (such as the "Atlantic Monthly") to Acade-mia at the end of the XIX century. Mo­reover, Clark outlines the pivotal role of public libraries and librarians in the re­valuation of childhood and children's literature as a cultural and educational priority.

This essay focuses on the socialization of children, reading practices, children's books, and other cultural artifacts and how young people from about three to eighteen are exposed to them. The concern is not about books, how many are read, and whether children learn to read, but how and why they are taught and prompted to mis-read, and by con­sequence, how and why we continue to mis-read problematic aspects of con­temporary culture. By mis-reading, which is non-reflective reading, geared toward quick absorption of information and signs not elaborated by the brain, the author means that we do not care­fully examine all the complex institu­tional processes that bear upon our rea­ding and our personal and public deci­sions and commitments and that we do not recognize that the rational and effi­cient operations in the socio-economic system that affect us and our children's lives lead to exploitative and reified re­lations among all people.

In the 1960s United States the fight for racial integration called for a revision of school curricula as well as textbooks and tradebooks, which resulted in an epochal change in the "all-white" world of children's literature. Thanks to sup­porting policies from the federal gov­ernment and the interest of publishers in the new market, children's writers and illustrators were able to publish books which portrayed American mul­ticultural diversity, dealt straightfor­wardly with the racial question and re­vised national history from the point of view of minorities.

Books for girls have enjoyed great po­pularity in the United Stated since the 1860s. However, as a subgenre of chil­dren's literature, they have only recen­tly started to be considered worthy of critical study. The different levels of marginalization that have been recogni­zed in the appraisal of children's litera­ture in academia are complicated by the overlapping categories of gender and age in the case of girls' book. The chan­ging fortunes of Little Women, and its author's subsequent fluctuations in and out of the canon, provide an illustration of the prejudices and contradictions that have influenced the critical fate of lite­rature for girls.

This essay examines some key aspects of Chicano/a children's literature: the questions of addressing and represen­ting cross-cultural subjects; the issues of intercultural education, bilingualism and language politics; the attempt to write along psycho-social and pedago­gical trajectories of validation of diffe­rence; the need to promote integration and school success; the implications of the multiple crosswriting strategies pre­sent in Chicano/a children's books. The essay discusses works by Pat Mora, Gary Soto, Juan Felipe Herrera, Amada Irma Perez, and Gloria Anzaldua, focu­sing mainly on picture books, which, by privileging a dynamic apprehension of meanings, constitute a convincing indi­cator of the conditions of socio-cultural relations, ideological pressure, and eth­nic representations in the way they vi­sualize participation in shared cultural narratives.

Davis explores exercises in life writing for children by reading several Asian American autobiographies, to limn their authors' purposes and factor them as part of a dynamic network of creative writing. Because ethnic autobiogra­phies for children challenge the con­struction and meaning of the national experience, particularly the epistemo-logical and phenomenological reality of the American child, reading these auto­biographies critically allows one to dis­cern the writers' strategies of meaning and their discursive significance in the intersecting contexts of Asian American children's literature and genre studies.