Sogni che fanno crescere. Il sogno iniziatico nella letteratura per ragazzi europea del XXI secolo

Youth fiction often focus on the development of a young hero. Such stories tell us about transformative experiences which work as initiations. Initiation was once a very important moment in human life, marking a passage which was recognized by the community as a whole. However, in the history of Western society official rites of passage has gradually disappeared, as already in 1956 Mircea Eliade announced it. Since then, a compensation for the inner life has become necessary, and the dream has become one of the possible places and times for this compensation. Thus, from Alice in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, contemporary youth fiction has often explored the initiatory potential of dreams, which provides the protagonists with an introductory experience marking a tuning point in their lives. In many novels, the protagonist lives an initiatory dream that leads him through a path of symbolic death and resurrection, from which he/she wakes up renewed. This thesis proposes to question the dream as a threshold between two forms of existence and a catalyst for initiation in contemporary European youth literature.