Disturbing Children in Swedish and Danish Children´s Literature

The project aims to explore disturbing images of children in Swedish and Danish children’s literature.

Disturbing is understood as a counter image to otherwise idealized and embellished norms regarding child autonomy, agency, and competence.

The questions asked are how idealized childhood norms are distorted in children’s literature and in what ways this correspond with contemporary notions on childhood?

How does this facilitate further understanding of children’s literature as participant in the construction of childhood?The texts explored span from picture books for younger children to novels for middle readers, derived from various genres to transgress age- and genre boundaries.

The project will be carried out through critical reading in combination with discourse analysis to emphasize the relation between children’s literature and childhood.

Michel Foucault’s theories of subjectivity alongside David Oswell’s and Eberhard Reithelhuber’s work on relational agency will provide the necessary theoretical framework.The project runs for three years and will result in a monograph alongside two peer-reviewed articles.

The importance of the project consists of its unique perspective on ways idealized childhood norms contain negative images that emerge as disturbing.

The project, thus, facilitate an innovative perspective that will introduce a new children’s literature research vocabulary of future importance, both within comparative literature and within childhood studies.