The intersection between ecocriticism and children's literature : the case of Abdel-Tawab Youssef

Abstract EN

This paper investigates the extent to which the fiction of Abdel-Tawab Youssef the renowned Egyptian writer for children has managed to espouse pivotal ecological causes such as pollution, desertification, climate change, production and consumption malpractices, radiation, toxicity, and transgression against plants and animals while riveting the attention of child readers through a most poetic language and variously gratifying forms.

In the first theoretical part of the paper, I explore the symbiotic intersection between ecocriticism and children’s literature as two interdisciplinary genres whose integration could professedly bear fruits in the arduous, all-embracing process of educating children culturally, aesthetically, religiously, and ecologically.

The second part of the paper substantiates the proposition put forward here through a sample collection of Youssefs fictional stories for children.

Special emphasis will be laid on the writer’s fictionalization of the relationship between children and animals, on his appropriation of the potentialities of language, and on his depiction of the ecological mentality as nonviolent, adaptive, responsive, and attentive to the environment, perceiving other creatures as subjects worthy of respect, whose different voices must be attended to, and with w'hom one is emotionally engaged, interwoven in an ecological and spiritual continuum.