Semenova Sof’ya Evgen’evna – undergraduate student, Department of Romance Linguistics, Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University; ORCID: 0009-0003-4307-6611
This article analyses Italo Calvino’s short story collection Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City through the lens of the criteria for children’s literature formulated by P. Nodelman in his work Pleasure and Genre: Speculations on the Characteristics of Children’s Fiction. The analysis demonstrates that the collection not only fully aligns with Nodelman’s criteria but also significantly transcends the conventional boundaries of children’s literature. The synthesis of three key elements – its increasingly complex narrative style, dynamic shifts in pragmatic oppositions, and postmodern playfulness – transforms Marcovaldo into a universal text that overcomes the age-related limitations of readerly perception.
Marcovaldo; Italo Calvino; Italian literature; children’s literature; literary pragmatics; postmodernism