Veljka Ruzicka Kenfel – författare

The purpose of this volume is to present the scientific background of the Children’s Literature and Translation research group, which was established in 1992 at the University of Vigo. In 2006 it was awarded the category of Excellence Research Group. The scientific activities of members over the twenty years it has been in existence have contributed to improving and intensifying research into children’s literature in Spain and also to raising its scientific status. The group has strengthened collaboration with other Spanish universities and opened fruitful cooperation with foreign research centres. This book shows some new research lines we are focussing on and reflects current research trends in Children’s Literature in Spanish universities.

This work analyses the Spanish Civil War in Spanish and European Children’s Literature from 1975, when Spain passed from a dictatorship to a parliamentary monarchy, to the present. The contributors focus on collecting narrative works that deal with the Civil War to describe how the war was lived, remembered and referenced in Spain and other countries and selecting books of literary importance to analyse pre-established topics such as genre, ideology, female/male characters, illustrations and intertextualities. They also propose translations of those works which have not yet been translated into one of the languages of Spain and compare the works based on theoretical-methodological models offered in theories such as post-colonialism, feminism, comparativism and cultural studies.

This book comprises studies on death in Spanish, British/American and German children’s literature, cinema and audiovisual fiction; several translations from English and German into Spain are analysed. References to death were censored in Spain, as they were omitted or softened not to traumatise young readers. However, in the last twenty years, this taboo theme has been included to enable children and young adults to overcome the loss of a loved one as a necessary part of growing up. Contributions to this book show the historical development of this topic in different films and literary genres following, among others, a fantasy-mythological approach or a realist and objective one, helping children and young adults face death maturely and constructively.