California Italian Studies

This essay brings theoretical perspectives developed in the field of Children’s Literature Studies to bear on Dino Buzzati’s 1945 picturebook, La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia. Through a close analysis of the composite (verbal and visual) text in the light of major trends in Italian children’s books from Edmondo De Amicis’ canonical Cuore (1886) through the fascist period, I suggest that Buzzati puts into question fundamental premises of children’s literature. I draw on the work of such scholars as Jacqueline Rose, whose ground-breaking study The Case of Peter Pan argues that children’s fiction is “impossible” insofar as it has been grounded in adult fantasies about children and about language; Perry Nodelman, who developed the notion of children’s literature as colonization; and David Lewis, who has worked on word and image interaction in picturebooks. I argue that Buzzati’s picturebook represents a rupture in the trajectory of Italian children’s literature through its radical questioning of the transparency of language.