ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a short exploration of children’s nonfiction: its definition, its history and development, the issue of whether it is a literary/artistic form or merely a corpus of books providing useful information. Special attention is devoted to the new nonfiction picturebook. A thriving international publishing phenomenon developed in the twenty-first century, the nonfiction picturebook is an imaginative, deviceful, multifaceted product whose aesthetic sophistication is crucial to the communication of knowledge, with the result that today nonfiction is, more clearly than ever, an integral part of children’s literature: an object of beauty as well as an informative tool, a creative as well as an instructional endeavor.
