A través del nuevo milenio y lo que el lector literario encontró allí: La narrativa infantil para lectores de 8 a 10 años

Abstract

The present study is situated in the scientific field of teaching of literature, in the specific area of children’s literature as a concrete cultural product. The main objective of this work has been to characterise contemporary children’s narrative, published within the Spanish market between 2003 and 2013, aimed at readers between 8 and 10 years old, and to identify the changes occurring in this narrative over recent decades. To this end, we have taken as a starting point Teresa Colomer’s doctoral thesis entitled La formació del lector literari a través de la literatura infantil i juvenil (1995) [The training of the literary reader through children’s and young adult literature], which describes the general characteristics and underlying reader itinerary of children’s literature during the period 1977-1990. In the first place, a representative corpus was chosen, composed of 36 works widely recognised for their quality by specialist critics, to which were applied the guidelines for narrative construction analysis proposed and approved by Colomer (1995). This analytical model was updated with the inclusion of non-verbal resources that might affect the constructional elements of the narrative. Having carried out this analysis, we moved on to the interpretation of the data obtained, contrasting them with those of Colomer’s (1995) study. The results show the construction of a children’s narrative with more homogeneous literary features in all the targeted age ranges, than were observed in previous decades, given that the innovations introduced during the 1980s seem to have been consolidated. At the same time, they nuance the transformations and reworkings of constructional elements of children’s narrative from the previous period, changes driven particularly by the preponderance of picturebooks and the influence of postmodern cultural trends.

Date of Award	11 Oct 2018
Original language	English
Supervisor	Maria Teresa Colomer Martinez (Director)