A meditation on how socialist Yugoslavia’s radical tradition of children’s literature was erased after 1990, and why reviving the figure of the “knowing child” matters urgently today.
Written by cultural theorist Lilijana Burcar, this essay traces the systematic erasure of Yugoslavia’s once vital tradition of socially engaged children’s literature. Burcar shows how, with the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s, a rich legacy of anti-fascist, anti-imperialist writing for young readers was pushed out of schools and libraries, replaced by a commercialised cult of “innocent childhood” that conceals class and political struggle.
For much of the twentieth century, socialist Yugoslavia cultivated a children’s literature that assumed something radical: that children were not innocent vessels to be protected from reality, but social beings being shaped by it. This literature spoke openly about inequality, exploitation, war, and solidarity, and it trusted young readers to understand the world they inhabited.
What replaced it was a flood of commercialised children’s books, largely imported from Western Europe, built around the romantic ideal of “innocent childhood.” Translations of global bestsellers and long canonised classics rapidly displaced domestic production. The result was not just a change in taste, but a transformation in ideology. Children’s literature was stripped of its social content and repackaged as escapism and moral neutrality. The child was no longer a subject embedded in history but a timeless, apolitical figure.
This cult of innocence has deep roots. The article suggests that its origins lie in English Romanticism, particularly in the work of William Wordsworth and his contemporaries, who imagined the child as pure, natural, and unmarked by experience. This was never an innocent idea. Romantic poets were often aligned with the rising bourgeoisie, and their vision of childhood conveniently erased the brutal realities of industrial capitalism, including child labour. Wordsworth himself opposed the education of working-class children, dismissing those shaped by social hardship as “unreal.” Innocence functioned as a political tool, masking class violence behind pastoral fantasy.
That same logic persists, the article argues, in much contemporary children’s literature. Western European classics, both old and new, often cloak conservative worldviews in fantasy. They reproduce patriarchal structures, racialised hierarchies, and imperial imaginaries, all while presenting themselves as harmless entertainment. Series like Harry Potter, which has dominated children’s literary socialisation in the region for decades, are emblematic, beneath their magic lies a rigid moral order that normalises hierarchy, exclusion, and inherited power.
Against this stands the Yugoslav tradition of socially critical children’s literature, that was moulded by Marxist thought and the lived experience of anti-fascist struggle. Its central figure was not the innocent child, but the “knowing child”, a protagonist who understands themselves as part of a social, political, and economic world. This literature did not protect children from reality. It offered them tools to read it.
Children’s magazines such as Zmaj played a crucial role. They published reportage on global liberation struggles, from Vietnam to Africa, alongside literature and history. Young readers were introduced to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, to debates about colonialism and imperial war, and to the idea that solidarity extended beyond national borders. Children were encouraged to see themselves as political subjects, capable of moral judgment and collective responsibility.
After 1990, this entire ecosystem collapsed. Publishing houses were privatised or shut down. Festivals like Kurirček, which had connected thousands of children across Yugoslavia through writing, art, and performance, were dismantled. Anti-fascist historical picture books disappeared from libraries. Today, in Slovenia, not a single public or school library holds key picture books depicting the National Liberation Struggle (the Yugoslav-era name given to the Communist-led resistance against Nazi occupation in the years 1941-1945). This absence is not neutral. It is the product of deliberate revisionism, the article suggests.
The consequences of this revisionism are cultural and political. Children are now raised on narratives that deny them a language for understanding systemic injustice. Poverty, war, and imperial violence are either sentimentalised or rendered invisible. The knowing child has been replaced by a child who is meant to feel, not think and to identify with heroes, not with collective struggle.
The article shows that reviving socially engaged children’s literature is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is a political necessity.
The original source article ‘Književnost od i za “znajuću” djecu’ by Lilijana Burcar was published in Croatian in Portal Novosti on 5 November, 2025.
It is available here.
Portal Novosti is the Zagreb-based digital platform of Novosti, published by Croatia’s Serb National Council since 1999 with a weekly print edition and an online portal covering news, cultural commentary, and critical analysis relevant to Croatian society and the wider region, often pertaining to Croatia’s Serbian minority.
Summary by ZN.
