Children’s literature: many links within a complex vision

Abstract

This article reflects critically on children's literature, starting from the complex vision used as a basis for conducting research in a field that stands at a cultural crossroads between literary, pedagogic, educational and historical studies. This generative crossroads substantiates the position of children's literature, and indeed children, within the dynamic process of the whole cultural system. In this perspective, children's literature is studied in multi-and inter-disciplinary terms, in a theoretical dimension investigating links with humanities, natural sciences and the arts. Studying children's literature in a complex key, in order to enhance its specific, multiform character within the languages and relations with children and their representations, requires a research methodology that uses an evidence-based, hermeneutic, philological and comparative approach, identifying “unexpected” sources, while considering the many correlations of meaning deriving from living within this crossroads.