The education of the reader as a topic in the latest narratives for children and young readers

Abstract

Among all the possibilities of children´s literature, one of the most important does to do with the adoption of the code of language and literary education. This objective is very explicit in a set of Spanish children´s stories of the last two decades in which the learning of language and literature is the subject of those stories. From the comparison of about seventy stories containing this topic, a panoramic overview of this material is shown, putting it in connection with children´s narratives of other European countries. A typology of this matalinguistic and metafictional narrative is outlined. Stories whose main characters are letters, words, dictionaries and encyclopaedias are found; stories whose plot represents reading methods and activities about reading and literary education; stories which adapt the great classics of universal literature. And finally, we can find stories in which the concept of linguistic and literary education suffers an entire process of allegory. In the best examples, the authors show the key of their literary vocation and the way to understand the literary creation.