Literary descendants of Celia en el colegio: girl's school stories in postwar children's and youth literature

Abstract

During the postwar period, and within the field of children’s and youth literature, there is a certain flowering of stories set in girls’ schools, usually in boarding school, always written by women and also aimed at a female children’s audience. From a basic corpus of ten novels, we investigate the specificity of a subgenre developed mainly in the Anglo-Saxon area, but stimulated in Spain through the early diffusion of Celia en el colegio. This novel will be a reference for Spanish women writers
who, respecting the basic scheme provided by Elena Fortún, adapt their proposals to the new literary situation of the forties and fifties. Despite society constrictions, this literature can provide images of feminine realization.