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Part of
Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults: Moving stories
Edited by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 13] 2023
► pp. 42–61

Chapter 2
The sublimity of darkness and its affective transmission and subduing in picturebooks

| University of Jyväskylä
| University of Jyväskylä
Darkness intrigues, promises mysteries, provides anonymity, and creates atmospheres of both safety and danger. As such, it is a source of the sublime. This chapter uses Edmund Burke’s separation of the beautiful and the sublime as a starting point to analyze affective differences in the presentation of darkness in picturebooks. By examining a selection of North American and European picturebooks dealing with the fear of darkness, we argue that some books seek to transmit the awesomeness of darkness, while many seek to curb its frightening sublimity via familiarity, anthropomorphism, cuteness, and humor. In choosing these kinds of representations, picturebooks adhere, variously, to discourses of risk, protection, and/or agency.
Keywords: sublime, fear of the dark, anthropomorphism, mystery, fear, darkness, cuteness, affect
Article outline
  • Introduction: Darkness, affect, and the sublime
  • Transmitting the sublime: The darkness of the universe
  • Gothic darkness and the affective transmission of fear
  • Darkness aestheticized through light colors, anthropomorphism, cuteness, adventure narratives, and humor
  • Being brave and staying safe: Darkness in the context of risk, protection and agency
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.13.02ylo
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