This dissertation examines the new emphasis on childhood in France that came from the destructiveness and trauma of the First World War. After the Great War, the French sought to rebuild their nation by redefining both young people's social responsibilities and adults' duties towards children. Politicians, educators, scientists, a social activists sought greater control over what seemed to be an increasingly valuable and potentially volatile social group. From 1918 to 1949, I argue, in public debates about the fashioning of a new, post-war youth culture, traditionalist, idealist, and scientific conceptions of childhood were competing alternatives. Each of these ways of thinking and talking about the social and cultural role of the next generation expressed different visions of the French nation in response to national crisis. Through the schools, family legislation, and leisure culture such as youth groups and the children's press, the younger generation assumed a new social and cultural position. French youth began to be seen as a national community, set apart by their age status from the rest of society, yet reflecting patriotic ideals and deeply-rooted French values. The new and distinct youth culture developed as part of post-war recovery served to mediate young people's relationship the nation, circumventing the earlier primacy of family relationships as the basis for social identity. During this time, French children were pulled out of the more private space of the family. This increased the sense of the power of youth as a collective entity, which also contributed to new fears of youth rebellion. These underlying tensions, between tradition and science and between heroism and rebellion, also led to the implementation of official regulation of French youth culture, notably through the passage in 1949 of a law censoring children's periodicals. Throughout this period, with state support, scientific theories gained the greatest authority over constructing the French child's world, but this new public space retained a deep-seated connection to adult-envisioned national ideals. In reforming the role of the younger generation after the war, the French found grounds for hope and national rejuvenation.

This dissertation examines the achievements of Spanish prose fiction in the last two decades and focuses mainly in the works of Luis Mateo Diez, Luis Landero and Antonio Munoz Molina. These authors, as well as many others, reapproach the Civil War and the Post War period with a different technique than their predecessors. Instead of employing social realism or experimentalism, they adopt new styles incorporating elements which have been absent from Peninsular literature for a long time, such as myth and fantasy. The study argues that the passage from realism to fantasy is part of the evolution of prose fiction as a genre. However, this development is triggered by social, cultural and historical events. Therefore, the analysis covers a historical review of the origins of the genre giving special attention to the mythical and chivalric aspects which contemporary novels borrow from the early works. The socio-cultural elements of the context are considered at the time the action takes place and also during the era in which the books were written. By combining these approaches one can bring out the literary truth of the texts which as claimed by Stephen Greenblatt is embedded in a text since its moment of conception. The literary truth of these fictions is that Spaniards have surpassed the historical division of the two Spains, and their efforts are now targeted at the search of new identities more according with individual subjectivity. This comprehensive analysis also enlightens the peculiar relationship between prose fiction and history.