There has been a long history of depicting death in literature written for the young in the west. In the earlier literature written for young people, dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth century, death is presented as something to fear, as a punishment for children who have exhibited rebellious bad behaviour (Clement). Peter Hollindale and Zena Sutherland identified a shift in the late nineteenth century where death became the mechanism for the child “to dispose of inconvenient parents” (259) and to be independent and walk towards adulthood without parental intervention (for a similar view, see Mallan; Nikolajeva). Death was thus not the ultimate taboo in Western literature written for young people before
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Citation: Su, Shuya. "Death in Children's Literature". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 September 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19747, accessed 16 October 2024.]
