The sublimity of darkness and its affective transmission and subduing in picturebooks

Abstract

Darkness intrigues, promises mysteries, provides anonymity, and creates atmospheres of both safety and danger. As such, it is a source of the sublime. This chapter uses Edmund Burke’s separation of the beautiful and the sublime as a starting point to analyze affective differences in the presentation of darkness in picturebooks. By examining a selection of North American and European picturebooks dealing with the fear of darkness, we argue that some books seek to transmit the awesomeness of darkness, while many seek to curb its frightening sublimity via familiarity, anthropomorphism, cuteness, and humor. In choosing these kinds of representations, picturebooks adhere, variously, to discourses of risk, protection, and/or agency.