CRIANÇAS QUE MORAM EM LIVROS

This article analyzes how childhoods are represented in contemporary children’s and young adult literature that thematizes reading as an aesthetic and cultural experience. Selected titles include The Day You Begin (Jeffers; Winston, 2016), Playing with Books (Núñez, 2017), Sweetness (Núñez, 2018), Into the Forest (Browne, 2008), and The Incredible Book-Eating Boy (Jeffers, 2007), whose metaphors mobilize bodily and spatial senses of reading—chewing, sweetening, playing, inhabiting, and building. The investigation is situated within the field of Cultural Studies in Education (Hall, 1997; Silveira, 2003; Silva, 2000), in dialogue with Michel Foucault (1996, 2003), assuming childhood not as a natural essence or fixed identity, but as a cultural presence, shaped by discursive and pedagogical practices. The analyses identified how these works shift reading from its instrumental dimension to a sensory, affective, and political practice, in which the child is not ventriloquized but appears as an active subject who devours, savors, and inhabits books. The architectural and gustatory metaphors of reading indicate literature as a space of dwelling, cabin, city, or banquet, where childhood constructs addresses for its subjectivity. It is concluded that these narratives reaffirm the child as a creative and cultural producer, capable of inventing worlds through reading.