ABSTRACT
Children’s literature, like childhood itself, is liminal by nature, and thus a perfectly fraught space in which to explore posthuman ways of thinking and being. With that said, scholarship in children’s literature is in a transitional moment concerning posthuman and new materialist approaches. To date, the lion’s share of posthuman scholarship in children’s literature has used animal stories, ecocritical stories, and especially dystopian young adult fiction as its key examples. In this chapter, I broaden the scope of this field by analyzing metatextual and realistic picturebooks to explore the question of what it means to be human.
