Wandering in Winter: Wonder and Childness in Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day

(conference, COVID cancelled) “Wandering in Winter” will take up the affect and effect of wonder in relation to Keats’s classic story of a child experiencing winter. Connecting its arguments to the discussions that surround The Snowy Day’s representation of a black child, as well as to both the notion of “childness” (Hollindale, Joosen, Rudd) and eco-criticism’s theories of the natural (Buell), it will suggest Keats’s young black protagonist’s wanderings through the urban landscape and wonderings in relation to snow and winter not only encapsulate an aesthetic of wonder but a politics of wonder.