Italian Children’s Literature and National Identity

This book examines how children’s books forged a unified national identity for the new Italian State. Italian fairy tales, novels, poems, and short stories imply that the personal development of the child corresponds to and naturalizes the modernizing development of the nation. Via a psychoanalytic lens, the book proposes that national identity was constructed via a process of renouncing and incorporating paternal and maternal figures, rendered as compulsory steps into maturity and modernity. Chapters on the heroic figure of Garibaldi, the Orientalized depiction of the South, and the role of girls in formation narratives show how melancholic itineraries produced gendered national subjects.