Little Precossi, Stunted Becky: A Comparative Analysis of Child Hunger and National Body Health Discourses in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature in Italian and English

This article compares two children’s literature classics, Cuore by Edmondo De Amicis (1886) and A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1905), an Italian text and an American/British text respectively. In my analysis, I apply a medical historical angle to the two novels, reading their images of malnourished and stunted children in the light of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western debate on child malnutrition and national discourse.