ABSTRACT
Suffering and death are very common themes in children's and young adult (YA) literature if the embedding of the genre in popular narratives, which normally contain violence of all sorts, is taken into account. Conditions of violence and death gradually vanish from children's and young adult books as they become appropriated by the school, a bourgeois institution, with strict mental hygiene principles, whose aims are generally bound to Christian and moralizing values. In the wake of the so called real-life literature, contemporary production of Brazilian children's literature began problematizing with more frequency and quality the notion of childhood as a period of unconcern and happiness. The discussions of the types of manifestations of violence and death in contemporary Brazilian production for children and young adults try to recognize whether such literary works can express, translate and shape the emotions and feelings that, frequently at the same time, enchant and torment people of all times and places.
