On the playground of fear Emotional literacy and negative emotions in children’s literature

Abstract

The present study offers a comprehensive overview of the relationship between children’s literature and emotional literacy, focusing on the negative emotion of fear. Adopting the perspective of cognitive criticism, it confirms that reading fiction is not only beneficial, but indispensable for our cognitive and emotional development. The study demonstrates through examining different genres how “playful learning” appears in literature, how different text strategies operate with the basic emotion of fear and how these strategies can help children and young adults gain valuable experiences on “the playground of fear”. The general result of this investigation is that literary texts for children and young adults are capable of keeping negative emotions under control and present them according to the needs of the age group they were written for. It is also concluded that emotional literacy cannot be separated either from the literary qualities of texts or from the field of literary literacy.