L’écologie dans la littérature de jeunesse au Luxembourg : pour une écocritique comparée intralittéraire

During the last decades, ecology has become a global socio-political stake, but also a recurrent literary theme. The recent research field of ecocriticism is rooted in the US, but is rapidly spreading across the scientific and cultural worlds, diversifying its interests and methods. Scholars all over the world particularly stress the importance of developing a comparative ecocriticism that internationally explores ecological discourses in different languages and cultures. According to the book’s aims, this paper compares three works of literature, which address environmental problems and/or try to develop an ecological sensibility, trespassing not national, but linguistic borders.
The study of children’s literature has not been waiting for ecocritical theory to attest the importance of ecology as a main theme in texts addressing children. In many ways, education and consciousness-raising of the younger generations are supposed to be crucial, because these future adults will be even more concerned with climate change and will have to offer creative solutions to the environmental crisis. Yet, excessive pedagogy, enforcing awareness or even guilt, of both environmental writings and didactical children’s literature, has been a central aesthetical problem. This invites us not to limit our conclusions to an evaluation of the texts’ ecological substance and correctness, but rather to describe the multiple bonds between nature, aesthetics and narratives. We thus choose three works in three different languages which represent three different literary genres, namely crime fiction, fairy tale and poetry, to suggest that this poetical diversity of languages, motives, themes and narratives has to be seen as literature’s stand for nature’s protection in a multicultural landscape.