Transgression vs the Politically Correct: Phases and Faces of a Core Category in Children’s Literature

Abstract

It seems that in recent years criticism has been eagerly focusing on ‘transgression’ and ‘transgressive’ as keywords that enlarge the epistemic horizon, allowing the scholar’s gaze to descry areas previously untouched, or explored with a different cultural bias. In the literary domain, as an intentional act that involves trespassing, and the breaking of rules performed in explicit ways, transgression is often linked to language and form, and also to questions of gender, politics, social behaviour. The following articles, while dwelling on transgression, locate it within the area of children’s fiction, thus operating a first preliminary transgression, inasmuch as this kind of literature has been traditionally moulded by the romantic and pastoral fallacy of childhood as an innocent, untainted, happy condition, and, in turn, by the Victorian cult of the child that thrived on aesthetically idealized representations of childhood and youth, teeming with sound moral principles, healthy didacticism, excellent examples of virtue.