Taboo or Not Taboo, That Is the Question!

Abstract

This article researches the adult readers of children’s books and their approach to such topics as portraying cruelty, death, sex, physiological details, and the manifestation of bodily functions. This material allows to see the diversity of “taboos” in children’s reading. Cruelty and various dangers in the real life of children and teens are in the “blind spot” of both society and literature; at the same time, death and bodily functions, that are seen as unappropriated for children’s reading, have been widely discussed in society without taboos and stigmatization. The author of the essay identifies four areas of taboo in the field of contemporary children’s literature, ranking them from imaginary taboo to truly forbidden, and reflects on the reasons that affect this ranking. The research material was the books of modern domestic and foreign authors, published over the past few years. These are novels, novels, short stories and picture books by authors such as O. Gromova, W. Nielsen and E. Erickson, U. Stark, A. Fried and D. Gleich, A. Belova and D. Wojciechowski, V. Holzwart and W. Erlbruch, A. Kiviryahk, etc.

Keywords: Taboos in children’s literature, taboo topics in literature, modern children’s literature, regulations governing literature, physiology in children’s literature, sexuality in literature, political repression in children’s literature, death in literature