WOMEN’S BIOGRAPHIES IN ITALIAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE (1962-2022). HISTORICAL AND ECOFEMINIST PERSPECTIVES

The research focuses on a largely unexplored literary genre in Italian children's and young adult literature, namely biography, specifically the biographies about female characters. Such narratives present young readers with models of behavior, sources of knowledge from various fields and historical periods, as well as testimonies of the plurality of life paths and professional careers. Considering children's literature as a heritage for identity construction, inherently characterised by the paradigm of complexity, the project aims to analyse how women’s biographies in Italian children’s and young adult literature have contributed to transforming gendered imaginary over the span of sixty years (1962-2022). The first objective is to historically reconstruct the development of the genre of female biography, around turning points such as the "annus mirabilis" of 1962, the conflictual change of the 1970s, the "breakthrough year" of 1987, and the new heroines portrayed in fictional series in the late 1980s, as well as the publishing phenomena of the new millennium that develops relevant topics such as gender equality and environmental activism. Secondly, since biography has predominantly represented the lives of male protagonists in Western culture, reflecting an anthropocentric framework, the research aims to propose a new ecofeminist perspective. Ecofeminism connects environmental and social issues affecting women, emphasising that both, along with their interconnection, are driven by a logic of domination imposed by Western society. The corpus of primary sources derives from a wide-ranging historical survey of cataloging sources (OPAC SBN, LiBeR Database), manuals of the history of children's literature, and historical journals in the field. A detailed analysis was conducted on the final selection of ninety-three illustrated female biographies published in Italy between 1962 and 2022, articulated in three phases. In the first phase, a specific taxonomic analysis identified the diachronic evolution of fields of knowledge, cultural background, and historical period of the women protagonists. In the second phase, an analysis of the narrative structure of the biographical genre was carried out, focusing on the narrator's point of view and the organisation of the knowledge conveyed by the text (chronologic-linear, organic-circular, or taxonomic-spatial). Finally, in the third phase, a qualitative content analysis was carried out, specifically along three correlating axes of investigation on female identity: model (a way of being and acting in a predetermined way), icon (an image with recurring traits that constitutes a trend), and symbol (a unified element that generates a network of meanings). These conceptual cores, outlined with a bottom-up approach from the literature, represent different nuances of the self, and are developed, from an ecofeminist perspective, in light of the intertwining of female subjectivity with the dimensions of human otherness, non-human beings, and the environment. The research aims to demonstrate how female biographies for young readers represent a significant source for analysing gendered imaginary and, at the same time, a meaningful historical-pedagogical research strand for reflecting on the potential of biographical narratives in constructing female identity.