Many cultures have tales in which the main character wears a particular item of clothing or is invariably portrayed with a specific accessory. This character then embarks on an adventure-packed ...journey during which he or she must face a ferocious and sometimes deadly foe. Little Red Riding Hood is perhaps the fairytale that is the most deeply woven into the history of Western imagination, which is probably why it is still capable of inspiring continual and original rewritings and adaptations. Italy’s lively telling of this tale is epitomised in the visual re-writings of the classic version by the Brothers Grimm. This paper analyses the relationship between clothing and fashion in fairytales. A selection of the visual re-writings of the Grimms’ Little Red Riding Hood published in Italy over the last 20 years will be compared, focusing on the clothing and accessories created by illustrators to dress and distinguish the tale’s characters. Capes, hoods, earmuffs, cloaks, rucksacks, skirts, dresses, blouses, collars, shoes, boots, ribbons and yarns are just some of the items that comprise Little Red Riding Hood’s garb. By adopting this perspective, my essay posits answers to the following research questions: is there an established standard for dressing Little Red Riding Hood in Italian visual retellings of the Grimms’ tale? And what about the relationship between dressing the “little girl in red” and the developments of the tale?
Picturebooks are by no means a homogeneous body of texts and they require different approaches to interpret their meaning-making mechanisms. A wide variety of challenges can be offered by ...contemporary picturebook research. One of these challenges refers to the investigation of a singular typology of picturebooks: picturebooks with no pictures. How do these picturebooks work? What kind of reading experience do they activate in young readers? The goal of my essay is to analyse the role of white space, the morphosyntactic characteristics and the narrative mechanisms of these picturebooks. I will focus on two pictureless stories dealing with a white silent snowy landscape: Little White Riding Hood by Bruno Munari (1981) and It looks Like Snow by Remy Charlip (1957). These two authors were able to transform white, apparently empty space into novel visual narratives capable of effectively engaging children and promoting their imagination and creative thinking.
The home is an emblematic topos in children’s literature. The home is intended primarily as a physical place where the family comes together, and where the protagonists’ primary needs are generally ...met. The home is also a place of memories and knowledge acquisition. It is capable of revealing the attitudes of the characters, their lifestyles, translating them into words and images. The home can reveal the quality of human relations within its walls and outside the family circle. The aim of this contribution is to analyze the home as a space of personal characterization and psychological, social and historical-cultural evolution. After providing a historical picture of Italian domestic life as of the years after World War II, the article outlines some of the ways in which the home, its interiors and the image of childhood have changed in Italian picturebooks over the second half of the 20th century.
The concepts of home and espace vécu play a large role in children’s literature. The home is not just an objective and architectural space, but also an intimate space with sensory, symbolic, ...cultural, social and political dimensions. The concept of espace vécu refers to a relationship between what "exists" and what "is perceived". Children build their own identity in the context of their families, developing relationships not only with people, but also with places and things. The aim of this special issue is to identify and analyse the evolution of the representation of these spaces in European picturebooks published in the period 1945-2010. An historical and comparative international survey on picturebooks has been carried out by researchers of children's literature, comparative education and geography from various European countries (Italy – coordinator, Croatia, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal), emphasising as the interdisciplinary study of domestic spaces represented in picturebooks is a particularly promising investigative field for reading, within an original perspective framework, social and cultural changes also occurring in the history of childhood.
Mirroring Alice Campagnaro, Marnie
IASL conference proceedings,
02/2021
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper explores the potential of picturebooks in an educational context. It presents the form and the function of postmodern picturebooks. It explains why and how teachers can use them with their ...children and it underlines some benefits: picturebooks enhance the level of visual literacy and develop pupil’s metacognitive skills. Finally, it proposes a methodology to help pupils and students to become more articulate interpreters of the visual narrativity.
This paper reviews the primacy of materiality in Bruno Munari’s work based on the case study of two of his picturebooks. Bruno Munari was one of 20th-century Italy’s most eclectic figures. Over the ...course of his lengthy career as an artist and designer, Munari explored the field of materiality in children’s books with exceedingly favourable results. His picturebooks set a precedent in the field of children’s literature, and they are highly valued even today. Children are fascinated by the opportunity to organise the experience of reading more freely thanks to innovative graphic and typographic mechanisms that fully exploit the editorial potential of materials such as paper, construction paper, and cardboard, but also transparent or semi-transparent sheets of acetate film, wood, plastic, sponge, and so on. In this paper, I describe the exclusive relationship that Munari developed over the years with the book as an object in all its various components (text and paratext). To do so, I discuss two of Munari’s significant editorial projects, the picturebook entitled Nella notte buia In the Dark of the Night (1956) and I Prelibri Prebooks (1980). I analyse the ways in which the Milanese artist succeeded in exploiting all the communicative, aesthetic and educational potential of these books’ material dimension.
Though they were not conceived or created for children, fairytales have always succeeded in striking a chord with the world of childhood ever since the dawn of civilization. Their sturdy animism ...certainly facilitated this process of attraction, with their talking animals, wonderful clothes, and magical objects. The items that cover, protect and adorn the bodies of the characters have a very special place in fairytales. They reveal the qualities of our heroes or heroines, the social sphere to which they belong, and their standing. But these objects can also carry symbolic messages that tell us a great deal more about the characters too, the privileges they enjoy, the powers they represent, and the dramas they experience. The present contribution analyzes the clothing and accessories appearing in a sizeable body of classical and contemporary illustrated fairytales. We hypothesize a novel approach to classifying these objects based on correlating the functionality of an accessory with its position on the character’s body. This analysis leads us to suggest several intriguing research hypotheses concerning the symbolic bonds between fashion, fable and childhood, and the possible references between the clothing and accessories of fairytales, historical-cultural developments, the political landscape, and fashions of the time.
Contemporary children’s literature has developed a growing interest in the interconnectedness between humans and the environment and in the ongoing exchange and negotiation of ways to be in the ...world. These new directions in children’s literature consequently challenge teachers of children’s literature in higher education. The study of contemporary children’s literature needs not only to be informed by new theoretical perspectives like ecocriticism, posthumanism and new materialism, but also to revisit, develop and explore the methodological tools and teaching practices necessary to prepare students to address these demanding issues. The aim of the article is to present and discuss the research question: How is it possible to secure scholarly dialogue and practical collaboration in an academic course on nonfiction children’s literature and environmental issues? Building on a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework consisting of theory of nonfiction, ecocriticism, dialogic teaching, environmental architecture and place-based teaching, the study reports on a pilot course which took place in the summer of 2020. Due to the pandemic situation the course became digital. Hence the digital challenges and possibilities turned out to be a critical aspect of the planned practical collaboration between students, teachers and students and teachers. The main goal of the course was to help motivate students to engage in and negotiate about nonfiction children’s literature and sustainability, to enhance their aesthetic experiences and to foster their environmental consciousness through children’s literature. The course was characterized by its alternating blending of lectures and hands-on experiences with theoretical and methodological tools as well as nature or culture specific places.
The fairy tale has a special role in forming Gianni Rodari's mind-set and writing. Fairy tales, with their ability to overturn social and cultural customs, models of behavior, and hierarchies of ...class and species were an inexhaustible driving mechanism for the creativity of this Italian children's writer. He also drew much inspiration from fairy tales for his educational works on the subject of childhood and imagination. The aim of this contribution is to reflect on the value that Rodari attributed to the fairy tale within an educational setting aimed at young generations, a vital mediator between adult culture and childhood culture.
The ludic dimension of Bruno Munari’s prolific children’s book publishing activity plays an important role, as far as narration and visual arts are concerned. Since the 1940s, and for the following ...50 years, books, play and education were fundamental reference points in the artistic production and critical thinking of this Milanese artist. Munari cultivated these influences with extraordinary results in his picturebooks. The following analysis of some of Munari’s texts offers a historical-critical perspective on the value, function and representation of play in this vast production. The present research relies on three main analytical categories: co-authorship, disorientation and the experience of the limit.
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