When Children’s Literature Plays with Autobiography

Abstract

Long marginalized, children’s literature is now recognized as a fully-fledged cultural and artistic field. In parallel with the renewed interest in autobiography, it has gradually adopted the codes of life-writing — first-person narration, fictionalized diaries, and semi-autobiographical narratives — to explore self-construction and the adolescent experience. Although the autobiographical pact remains rare in this domain, these fictionalized forms foster both identification and ethical reflection in young readers. Authors address sensitive topics while maintaining a protective stance toward their audience. Thus, children’s literature has become a space of experimentation where the quest for authenticity, the transposition of lived experience, and the fictionalization of the self intersect.