Juvenile Literature and the Human-Colonial:Reading Close with Syd Hoff’s Picture-Books

Abstract

Picture Books has been quite an integral part of juvenile literature for a time-being, and almost
from the very beginning when children’s literature was shaping itself up into a separate genre.
These books are important part of this very genre, especially as the very first step in the world
of learning for little nursery kids. But, even nursery-books carry certain seeds of regressive
attitude and blatant anthropocentric celebrations being one of them, and we can find them
under the happy, fun and colourful façade of picture-books as well. Syd Hoff (1912- 2004), is an
famous American illustrator and cartoonist with a fair share of nursery picture-books among
his compositions, and yet underexplored from a critical purview. In this paper it has been
attempted to address the problematic ‘speciesism’ in nursery picture-books with a number of
Hoff’s compositions for a close reading to progress with.