Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature

Visiting genres like advice literature, novels, picturebooks, and film, this book explores the relationship between representation, affect, and emotion in children’s literature, demonstrating how texts function as tools for emotional socialization, enculturation, and political persuasion. It engages with the representation of emotions, ranging from shame, grief, and anguish to compassion and happiness, as psychological and embodied states and cultural constructs with ideological significance. It explores the role of narrative empathy in relation to emotional socialization and the ethics of representation in relation to politics, social justice, gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality.