Exploring the Agential Child in Death-Themed Picturebooks: A Comparative Analysis across Cultures

The status of adults and children in children’s literature is a complex, long-debated issue. Marah Gubar introduced the kinship model, challenging the notion of children as voiceless and emphasizing their agency as human beings. This study argues that the model can serve as a fruitful framework for examining the representation of children in death-themed picturebooks because the phenomenon of death places children and adults in a relatively equal position and implies similarities between them. It analyzes 11 picturebooks featuring agential child protagonists and published in the UK, the US, Japan, and Taiwan. The analysis is directed at four representations: the independent child, the atomized child, the helpful child, and the analogous child and adult. Each exploration describes whether and how the texts illustrate the model’s key points: (1) a child’s voice and agency; (2) the relatedness, connection, and similarity between children and adults; and (3) the gradual, erratic, and variable nature of development from childhood to adulthood. The findings highlight the heterogeneity of agential children across cultures and suggest that scrutinizing childhood requires engagement with adulthood. This perspective inspires us to reconsider the adult-child dichotomy and expand our imagination of what children can be across cultures.