ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the appearance of picturebooks and stories which sought to rapidly mediate the first waves of COVID-19, circulated online to reflect a suddenly socially distanced and locked-down world. We conceptualise this ad hoc archive as an "emergency children's literature” to signify the pedagogical, ritual, and remedial role of storytelling during times of disease and disaster. In this chapter, we introduce this concept and historicise the role of children's literature across 2020. We analyse the international focus of these texts, such as those sponsored and cross-translated by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), before conducting a critical content analysis of approximately thirty picturebooks and stories circulated online for free within British contexts between March 2020 and January 2021. These British-associated texts are mostly self-published, while some are published by mainstream publishers or literacy charities and other educational and official organisations. Building on existing scholarship on the trope of the hero as a health promotional strategy for representing COVID-19 for children, we theorise the aesthetic and formal strategies of these representations, heeding the socio-political contexts which they both emerge from and help to construct in young people's lives. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022