The Pandemic in Children’s Books: Toward a Hyper-Modern Society? The Italian Case

Abstract

Introduction: The paper analyses some children’s books printed in Italy in the last two years in order to tell and explain to children the COVID-19 pandemic, assuming that the national case could be compared or generalized to the publishing markets of other countries. The starting hypothesis was that our time is characterized by a deep change in grounding values.

Research Aim: The research aims to identify the recurrent themes offered to the attention of children during the pandemic, trying to understand on which ideas of society and human coexistence they are conceived.

Method: The research has been carried out by reading the main children’s books published on the pandemic issue and considering the national simultaneous political and cultural debate on the measures adopted to contain the virus spreading.

Results: With some remarkable exceptions, children’s books were strictly focused on health aspects and on the contagion prevention, rather than on more educational matters, often ignoring the youngsters’ sufferance of the two last years, when children were not allowed to go to school, to meet friends and to have a normal social life.

Conclusions: The analysis seems to confirm the starting hypothesis of a deep change in common sense and in the main values. The pandemic is maybe the turning point of a historical process which started on September 11, 2001, that I suggest to connect to the concept of “hyper-modern”, introduced in the early hyper 2000s to signaling the running out of the post-modernist point of view.