Nonfiction for Children. Theoretical issues, historical overview and new developments

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of children’s nonfiction: its definition, its
evolution, the question of whether it can be considered part of children’s literature altogether,
or rather a corpus of books that are different from the narrative, poetic, imaginative,
‘artistic’ children’s titles. In the attempt to understand which elements can contribute
to the creation of a quality nonfiction, special attention is paid to the so-called ‘pictorial
turn’, and more specifically to the nonfiction picturebook, a publishing phenomenon that
started during the 2000s at an international level. The nonfiction picturebook is especially
interesting, as a medium, because, both content – and form-wise, it is characterized by
a strong experimental and innovative drive, and this inevitably affects the way knowledge
is communicated and shared with children.