Conflicto armado y literatura infantil y juvenil:Dos obras, dos historias de la historia de la humanidad

Abstract

Death has been one of the themes from time immemorial in ChL/YA (Russell, 2015, p. 237). It was limited to protecting this audience from the naked truth of the unpleasant, painful reality of life, so it was sweetened to the point of triviality. However, Marcelo (2007, p. 19) has observed that until the 60’s and 70’s, themes in ChL were limited to protect the young from reality, unpleasant and painful life experiences. Until then, the happy final ending ruled, and the hero always returned home victor after eradicating evil and his efforts rewarded. (Propp, 2011, pp. 70-72) But then Colomer (2010, p. 157) remarked how ChL/YA today has left behind this sweetening of the theme to present it in a reinterpretation of the past, to the point of distorting historical facts. These statements are reconfirmed below through studying two literary works (La guerra civil contada a los jóvenes (The Spanish Civil War Narrated to the Young) and El hogar de Miss Peregrine para niños peculiars (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children)), which are targeted towards the young reader and show the reality of armed conflicts, narratives which are part of the history of humanity.