Abstract
Starting from Levinas’s position that “emotion does not follow the representation of the object” but precedes it, the paper shows the ways in which socially marginalized beings (animals, children), through longing for acceptance and longing for community, struggle in life with the involuntary push into loneliness. In the worlds of Finnish children’s literature, devoid of adults, we can see the ways in which different social and life edges merge in order for their representatives to overcome alienation by forming friendships. In this sense, an old man and a girl enter into a cooperative, business relationship in Magdalena Halonen’s and Teemu Juhani Karttunen’s story The Little Shop of Horrors, the homeless old man Kuna and a dog named Cat find each other in the story of the same name by Tomi Kontio, while the girl Tilly, in the story My Friend Donut Cookie, grows up, seeing in his purchased pony, a means of riding, a future friend. In this way, Fromm’s view of “freedom from” is transformed into “freedom for”, and the reader’s target group of children is inspired to see the world around them ethically in a different way.
Published Version
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