Storie della buonanotte per bambine ribelli: un caso editoriale “femminista”?

This article analyses volumes 1 and 2 of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, which represent a famous publishing case and have sparked a heated debate and discordant reactions. My aim is to understand whether this project can be defined as a ‘feminist’ initiative, placing it within a broader framework of narrative typologies historically recognized in Western culture. To this purpose, I retrace the history of catalogues of women to pose some relevant questions that drive the analysis of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. Dating back to antiquity, these catalogues had very different purposes and users, culminating in the work of Christine de Pizan (1364 –1430), who proposed a new female subjectivity through the rewriting and deconstruction of the ‘dispute-of-women’ tradition. In and of itself this literary genre does not affirm emancipatory models; rather, the emancipatory charge is correlated with other elements (the target audience, the purpose, and the structure). Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls takes up this model in a time in which the biographical narrative genre has become central to children’s literature and is used as an educational device to deconstruct gender stereotypes. Good Night Stories, a project that has involved women at different levels and in different roles, is revolutionary in its content, images, and dissemination. I analyse all these aspects in the light of the meaningful questions that emerge from the history of catalogues of women.