Biophilia and Anti-Immortalism in Children’s Literature: Born to Die (Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment)

Children’s literature has traditionally been analyzed through humanist frameworks like psychoanalysis and gender theory, which, while legitimizing the genre’s study, fail to address its focus on animals, rural settings, and nature.This project takes a non-humanist, sociobiological approach, arguing that children’s literature has, for over a century, fostered what E.O. Wilson calls “biophilia”-an evolution-based affinity for living things expressed through innate impulses and predispositions.Focusing on chapter books with immortality as a theme, such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, and Ursula Le Guin’s The Other Wind, the study explores how children’s literature promotes a syncretic biotheism, revering life’s natural cycles while rejecting immortalist ideologies like Christian post-death immortality and secular life extension.These books depict human death as reintegration into nature, offering young readers a unique “ecological litera