“Here Lies a Bird that is Dead”: Children’s Funeral Games in Contemporary Picturebooks

This article examines a contemplative yet underexplored topic, children’s playful funerals in death-themed picturebooks. Taking Margaret Wise Brown’s The Dead Bird as a foundational case, this work compares a group of picturebooks sharing a similar thematic pattern: children finding a dead animal by accident, organising funerals for the animal and then returning to play. Drawing on Victor Turner’s theory of ritual process and performance studies, these activities, in between childly games and formal funeral practices, cannot be simply read as children’s responses to loss and grief. Through flexibly modifying the spatial organisation of ritual sites and children’s bodily engagement with the material surroundings, selected picturebooks invite both characters and young readers to negotiate their agency and identities as members of a living community. Multiple nuances over time are also observed during the diachronic reading, reflecting the ever-changing implications of death in children’s literature. While the selected picturebooks continue to present death as a threshold for play, reflection, and social formation, they are more likely to relocate the ritual within safer, more supervised spaces, where children’s agency is partly reframed through emotional bonds and the presence of an adult-dominated, civic order.