Introduction
Children’s books have for a long time been marginalised from the study of “Literature”, being often considered a matter of private delight which does not deserve adults’ critical attention. Over the last two decades, though, the study of children’s written literature has flourished worldwide, indicating that children’s books are not naïf but complex literary products whose nature challenges critics to break down barriers between disciplines and between types of readers (Hunt, 1999: 2). This theoretical and methodological opening has no doubt been stimulated by post-colonial writings, new historicism and cultural studies, which linked the effort to recover different histories and points of views to the recovery of texts that have never been considered worthy of academic study (Watkins, 1999: 34-35).
In Africa too, there has been an increasing recognition, since the 1980s, of the value of children’s literature, and of its central role in the educational system for developin...
