ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses how texts for children written after unification and before fascism, or during the early years of the unified state. Informed by post-structuralist and psychoanalytic interpretive techniques and grounded by sociological and historical concerns, this book examines how books for children naturalized the link between modernization and maturation. Eric Tribunella's study of American children's literature serves as a methodologic model. Powerful theoretical paradigms in Children's Literature Studies have been developed primarily from analyses of American and British texts. Children's literature constructed a narrative in which growing up meant revering but leaving behind epic heroism embodied in the famous figure of the liberation warrior. Although not a writer for children, Scipio Sighele produced several sociological and criminological studies that disseminated in Italy evolutionary-based concepts such as recapitulation and atavism.
