830 Literaturen germanischer Sprachen; Deutsche Literatur
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Spain is a gateway to Europe and has long been a destination for migrants and refugees from Africa and Latin America. In the last decades, the country has received a significant number of people from the Saharawi tribe in the Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony today occupied by Morocco and Algeria. Like other European countries it has also received individuals and families fleeing from the conflicts in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring. Spain has a history of its people crossing the borders during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Despite these experiences, exiles and asylum seekers are seldom depicted in its children’s books. When they address such topics, most stories in recent books are about forced displacements of people during World War II or conflicts in regions far from Spain such as Nepal, the Middle East, or Afghanistan. A few Spanish books addressed to young adults, or recommended for readers between nine and eleven, deal with Saharawi refugees but they are usually set in African refugee camps. They seldom depict the refugee as a migrant who might come and establish a life in Europe. ...
There is a curious gap in the scholarship on texts for young people: while series fiction has been an important stream of publishing for children and adolescents at least since the last decades of the nineteenth century, the scholarship on these texts has not been central to the development of theories on and criticism of texts for young people. The focus of scholarship is much more likely to be on stand-alone, high-quality texts of literary fiction. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), for example, has occupied critics in the field far more often and more significantly than all of the 46 popular novels about schoolgirls with similar plots that were published by Grahame’s contemporary, Angela Brazil (beginning in 1904 with A Terrible Tomboy). Literary fiction such as Grahame’s tends to be defined in terms of its singularity – the unique voice of the narrator, unusual resolutions to narrative dilemmas, intricate formal designs, and complicated themes – often specifically as distinct from the formulaic patterns of series fiction. Yet, curiously, scholars typically use examples from literary fiction to illustrate the common characteristics of books directed to young readers: it was Grahame’s book, and not Brazil’s books, that appeared in the Children’s Literature Association’s list Touchstones as one of the "distinguished children’s books" the study of which "will allow us to better understand children’s literature in general," according to Perry Nodelman, who chaired the committee that produced the list. (Nodelman 1985, p. 2) ...
Editorial
(2017)