Figures of Youth

Joanna Krongold explores how Holocaust literature for children and young adults imagines, narrates, communicates, and alters the facts of war, genocide, and trauma.Figures of Youth analyzes the literary strategies and stylistic tools that are used when attempting to represent the atrocity and enormity of the Holocaust for children. Joanna Krongold explores figurative dynamics - tellings and retellings of the Holocaust that rely on metaphor and imagination rather than strictly literal techniques. Spanning chronological time periods, cultures, and genres, this book charts patterns of representation as time propels authors farther away from the event itself, demonstrating how and why children's literature makes important contributions to the field of Holocaust studies. By placing well-known texts like Anne Frank’s diary in conversation with those that have been excluded or ignored in scholarly discourse surrounding Holocaust literature, the author offers a new and innovative understanding of metaphor and figurative dynamics in the representation of genocide.