This book explores the relationships between ethics and aesthetics in children's fiction, focusing on issues considered "difficult" or "controversial" based on current considerations of what would be appropriate for them. Macarena García González critically examines the premise that children's literature serves to learn from emotions by questioning adult epistemologies and the conservative apprehensions that underlie when books are used to teach how to feel. In eight chapters it explores different themes - empathy, violence, xenophobia, death, migration, gender and poverty, among others - in children's books, film animations and in the discourses and practices that appear from different institutions that shape the cultural consumption of children. The question that is woven throughout the volume is how certain emotional repertoires that are offered and favored in children's fiction are entwined with inequities and exclusions from contemporary society.

 Macarena García González (Santiago, 1980) is a journalist with a master's degree in cultural studies from the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands, and a doctorate in social anthropology and cultural studies from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. From the Center for Advanced Studies in Educational Justice of the Pontifical Catholic University, he develops research that explores intersections between literature, the arts, epistemologies and education. She is the author of The Stories We Tell Children about Immigration and International Adoption (Routledge, 2017) and co-author, with Óscar Contardo, of La era ochentera. Tevé, pop and under in the Chile of the 80s (Ediciones B, 2005 / Planeta, 2015). She has been a visiting researcher at the Internationale Jugendbibliothek in Munich, Germany, and at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. She works as a teacher and currently directs the Research Project Fondecyt Emotional and Literary Repertories for Children.