Rebel History: The Feminist Illustrated Biographical Dictionary as a Genre

• Published in: Children's literature in education Vol. 56; no. 3; pp. 476 - 493
• Main Authors: Rudin, Shai, Lachover, Einat
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.09.2025
• Subjects: Education; Language and Literature; Language Education; Linguistics; Original Paper; Social Sciences; Sociology; Illustrations; Gender; Biographical illustrated dictionaries; Biographical writing
• ISSN: 0045-6713; 1573-1693
• DOI: 10.1007/s10583-024-09578-8

Biographical writing for children is controversial. While writers desiring to teach children of the past may attempt to sweeten the historical “medicine”, they may also tend towards the superficial, tendentious and abstract, leaning on their contemporary moral codes. This article will conduct a structuralist mapping of the genre of feminist illustrated biographical dictionary for children in order to portray the characteristics of the genre in their uniqueness, based on three literary works dedicated to groundbreaking women: Francesca Cavallo and Elena Favilli Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls , San Francisco, 2016; Blazing a Trail: Irish Women Who Changed the World , by Sarah Webb, 2018; and Real-Life Legends , by Shoham Smith, 2019. Although the first of the three launched a worldwide wave of children’s biographical illustrated dictionaries, children’s literature research has not yet addressed this genre. Hence, a comparative study of the entries and illustrations of the three dictionaries should enlighten us regarding their dominant ideologies, their illustrative approach and the poetics on which the writing of their entries is based. Research into the poetics reveals a distancing from the norms of historical writing for children while favoring the art of narrative construction, through what we shall call “strategies of narrative accessibility.” While, in the past, children read biographical novels at the end of elementary school, today, they must first read a biographical dictionary, which will prepare them for more complex reading. Hence the uniqueness and importance of the feminist biographical dictionary - for promoting feminist values concurrently with the early knowledge of the characteristics of historical-literary writing for children.