Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Laura Kanost / Early in the twentieth century, children’s literature in Spain developed greatly in
terms of quality and distribution thanks in large part to the appearance of new publishing
houses, illustrators and authors. Additionally, increased demand brought with it new
translations of many foreign texts for children. Despite these early developments,
children’s literature suffered a dramatic change after the establishment of Francisco
Franco’s Nationalist regime; during the post-war period many types of literature were
heavily censored, while children’s literature in particular devolved into what was in large
part an ideological tool. Many of the texts for children during this period either directly
or indirectly propagated a conception of “Spanishness” that excluded non-Catholics,
particularly Iberian Muslims and those that supported the Second Spanish Republic that
the Nationalists had toppled. Much like the Reconquista fought against the Iberian
Muslims centuries earlier, the Spanish Civil War was often represented as a sort of
crusade against non-Catholic (and therefore “non-Spanish”) Others. Many texts for
children presented the elements of this narrative by means of auto-images (images of
the Nationalist conception of “Spanishness”) and hetero-images (typically images of the
“Otherly” Republicans and Muslims). The contrasts formed between these two sorts of
images reveal how Spanish children were taught to conceive of themselves, as well as the Others of the Nationalist narrative.
The texts discussed in this report include two civics texts (Así quiero ser: El niño
del nuevo estado [1943] and España nuestra: El libro de las juventudes españoles
[1943]), as well as two comic books (El Guerrero del Antifaz [1943-1966] and Flechas y
Pelayos [1938-1949]) that were chosen for their representativeness of the sorts of texts
widely available to and read by children during the post-war period.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:KSU/oai:krex.k-state.edu:2097/17588 |
| Date | January 1900 |
| Creators | Todd, Daniel |
| Publisher | Kansas State University |
| Source Sets | K-State Research Exchange |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Report |
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