collaborators were Monserrat Del Amo, Ángela Ionescu, Consuelo Armijo and Gloria
Fuertes.
Before 1962 it was forbidden to publish anything in any of the other languages spoken
in Spain, such as Catalan, Galician and Basque but after that date there was a
flourishing of literature in these languages, particularly in Catalan.
During the 1970s a great change can be detected in children’s literature as a result of
political changes. On the one hand, numerous translations allowed the Spanish to
become acquainted with new European trends; on the other, there was an increasing
number of original books in Galician, Basque, and, mainly, Catalan. Many of the
Catalonian authors, such as Josep Vallverdú, Mercé Company and Joan Manuel Gisbert
also wrote in Spanish, or were translated.
In the last twenty years, the themes in children’s literature in Spain have dealt not
only with of rural life seen from a nostalgic point of view versus life in the city, but also
with new themes, mainly related to ecology, and to the countryside, and even some
themes never before mentioned in books for children, such as racism and xenophobia,
divorce, poverty, mental illness, and so on. Many of these themes, which may in fact be
assimilated with difficulty by children, had to be treated with humour, in order to make
them more accessible. But humour itself also took on new forms, with eschatological
references which had not been allowed before, and with the demystification of witches
and dragons, as well as the creation of new characters of fantasy. The influence of
Rodari, Tolkien and Ende can be felt here. In this way a new style appeared, called
‘fantastic realism’ and seen in works by J.M.Gisbert, Mercé Canela and Pilar Mateos.
With reference to theatre, at the beginning of the century some well-known
modernists, and authors of the Generation of 98, started to write for children. Here we
must mention Ramón del Valle Inclán, who in Farsa infantil de la cabeza del dragon [The
Children’s Farce of the Dragon’s Head] presented the first ideas of what would later be
known as ‘esperpento’ and also Jacinto Benavente, who, with his touches of irony and
social satire (and showing himself as dogmatic as in his works for adults), wrote El
nietecito [The Grandchild] and El príncipe que todo lo aprendió en los libros [The Prince
who Learnt Everything from Books]. The brothers Serafín and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero,
used music in La muela del rey Farfán [King Farfan’s Tooth], written with the sole
intention of amusing children.
Later, during the Republic (1931–1936), the Government gave Alejandro Casona the
task of undertaking a mission for children similar to that which García Lorca undertook
with his travelling theatre ‘La barraca’. In the 1960s, during the dictatorship, the
government subsidised theatrical companies. We may mention Lauro Olmo, Alfonso
Sastre and Carlos Muñiz, who both in their children’s plays and in their adult works
dealt mainly with social themes.
Nowadays authors, more closely connected to the world of children, tend to make
children fully participate in the plays they write.
In poetry, before the civil war there were collections of folklore for children, fables, and
anthologies of classical writers, but there was no proper children’s poetry until sometime
after the war. Exceptions are the poems of Alejandro Casona, Josefina Bolinaga and
Carmen Conde. It took some time after the war to realise that this genre could also be
enjoyed by children, and various authors such as Celia Viñas, Pura Vázquez and Gloria
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