L’italiano per l’infanzia dal 2000 fino ai nostri giorni. Il caso Geronimo Stilton

Children literature has developed remarkably during the last decade despite being a genre traditionally considered as minor in comparison to general literature. On the contrary, it represents a highly significant cultural, literary and commercial phenomenon. Content is not the only important factor of this literary genre: in fact, language plays a fundamental role in the development of the child. However, it has been understudied, especially regarding the recently published works. The present work has been conducted on a corpus of 16 novels published from 2000 to 2016, and this could be regarded as a representative sample of the most successful Italian children book series: Geronimo Stilton. The main objective is to study the language designed for present-time children, the so-called “digital natives”, and identify its fundamental features which are different from the language employed in different textual genres. The study has been divided into two parts. The first part is a study of the Italian market whose target is children literature published since 2000 and is dealt with in the first two chapters. The first chapter is an analysis of the aspects of contemporary Italian literature for children in its new definitions, themes, phenomena and diffusion of fantasy as a literary genre. The second chapter is a thorough examination of the Geronimo Stilton literary case: the reasons behind its success, the philosophy of using a mouse as a protagonist and how its story develops in several series. The second part includes a linguistic analysis of the lexical, morphological and syntactical levels of the strategies employed by Stilton’s staff and how these are significant in attracting young readers. It is divided into two chapters: the first is dedicated to adventure novels of different kinds that address children aged between 6 and 9, while the second is dedicated to the spinoff series that address pre-adolesecents aged between 10 and 13. The findings show that the language in Stilton’s books provides a dynamic portrait of standard Italian that is accessible, creative and involving, though not oversimplified. Key words: Children’s literature, Geronimo Stilton, Italian for children, Italian linguistics, standard Italian, seriality