Reading of the contemporary poetic narrative

Abstract

When childhood starts to be regarded as a stage in life, children start to receive specific cultural products, among them a literature for themselves. On the first books aimed at children, they were only the text’s addressee and they almost never appeared as characters. However, with the genre’s consolidation, children were able to reach the protagonist’s role . This article examines how two contemporary works (Os bolsos do mundo, by Fabiana Tasca, 2003 and Exercício de ser criança, by Manoel de Barros, 1999) are built, in order to analyze their underlying reading proposal. These works convey, by words and illustration, a content that respects children’s longings and perspective. They express, respectively, children’s fantasy of conceiving world spaces as a pocket hiding beings and a girl’s relationship with her brother and intrinsic childhood dreams. Both narratives, using illustration and words, allow children’s interaction with the text and signal the emancipation of both reader and children’s literature, granting it as an art status.