Biotopies d’hommes illustres : Peter Sís et les biographies voyageuses

In his many books for young people, author-illustrator Peter Sís has often taken an interest in the lives of illustrious men, all of whom shared a taste for travelling and the experience of a quest to retrieve the freedom they had been denied. Welzl, Columbus, Galileo, Darwin, Saint-Exupery—in every respect, each of these travellers follows the imaginary quest for freedom that Sís conceived from his own experience as an immigrant. The five biographies we propose to study in this article show that children’s picture books are not a specific genre of literature, but rather a plastic and narrative form that plays with genres.In this article, we will demonstrate that Sís’s biographies all rely on the same plot structure, and aim at generalising the same modus habitandi/vivendi. Sís deploys his talents as a storyteller who uses pictures in order to give meaning to a constellation of biographemes that reveal how one’s self changes in relation to encounters, relationships and itineraries. Such is, at least, the thesis we would like to defend through the analysis of the five biographies that will constitute our corpus