Modes of environmental imagination

Abstract

This article investigates how emerging environmental concerns became an important part in the history of Swedish children’s literature between 1968 and 1977. The politically and socially engaged children’s books published during this period are often considered to follow a strictly realistic norm. This article, however, highlights that the alleged realistic mode of representation is countered by a political writing that allows the supernormal and magical to permeate the plot. Following this, the books analysed here display a tension between different modes of non-realistic environmental writing and challenge the common view that political children’s books of the 1970s were limited to a realistic mode. The article concludes with a discussion of how imagination in environmental children’s literature can be interpreted as a political and emancipatory force, following the thinking of Herbert Marcuse, who was one of the chief philosophers for radicals around 1968.