Between Death and Renewal: The Poetics of Longing and Life in Ulf Stark, Angela Nanetti, and Mira Lobe

Abstract

This paper explores the interconnected themes of death, longing, and life in three notable works of contemporary children’s literature: The Runaways by Ulf Stark (2015), My Grandfather Was a Cherry Tree by Angela Nanetti (1997), and The Grandmother in the Apple Tree by Mira Lobe (1965). Although these narratives arise from distinct cultural and temporal contexts, Swedish, Italian, and Austrian respectively, they converge in their sensitive and imaginative portrayals of mortality and loss. The study adopts a comparative qualitative methodology grounded in close textual analysis and informed by literary criticism and developmental psychology. Through this approach, it examines how each narrative mediates the child’s confrontation with death, transforming it from a taboo subject into an opportunity for emotional and cognitive growth, hoping to use it in an Albanian context. The analysis pays particular attention to narrative voice, symbolism, and intergenerational relationships, tracing how empathy, imagination, and memory function as narrative tools for resilience and meaning-making. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from reader-response theory, narrative therapy, and children’s literature studies, the paper interprets these stories as acts of reconciliation between presence and absence, loss and renewal. It argues that these texts collectively challenge traditional pedagogical norms by presenting grief not as a rupture but as a process of continuity and connection. Ultimately, the study demonstrates how contemporary children’s literature can serve as a literary and emotional space where complex emotions surrounding death are explored with honesty, tenderness, and hope, empowering young readers to articulate and transform their own experiences of longing and life.