I bambini e i loro spazi. Un dialogo tra Geografia dell'infanzia e Letteratura per l'infanzia

Abstract

In recent decades, the field of childhood studies has profoundly reshaped the understanding of children as social actors rather than passive recipients of adultimposed structures, norms, and constraints. Within this broad area of inquiry, both the geography of childhood and scholarship on children’s literature have independently identified space as a key dimension of children’s lived experience, as well as of adult projections onto childhood. Despite this shared concern – namely, an interest in how space structures relations of power and possibility between adults and children – there has been little sustained dialogue between these two fields. Drawing on canonical works of children’s literature alongside the analysis of two recently published picturebooks, this article argues that literary spaces offer a particularly revealing lens through which to examine the tensions that shape adult–child relations. In doing so, it highlights how children’s literature makes visible and imaginatively negotiates oppositions such as control and agency, prohibition and transgression, and protection and autonomy.