Methodological horizons of research on children’s literature in Italy

Abstract

The epistemological status of children’s literature, which is characterised by complexity
and social and literary issues, calls for a critical approach to suitable and extensive research
tools that enable the study of the discipline in its historical-educational complexity,
balancing literary focus and the media.
In Italy, the multi-factorial historiographical approach has developed new fields of investigation
and contributed to making children’s literature the focus of cultural debate in the
strict sense of the term, as witnessed by research on literary texts and on children readers
in the past. This paper wishes to explore the methodological approach in the context of
the study of children’s magazines. Through these, it is possible to pursue a different
method of studying literary texts by means of a critical comparison between magazine
and volume publications, and to discover idiographic knowledge about the reader education
processes that children’s magazines promoted.