Historical overview of the nicaraguan children's literature from the sixties until the present time

Abstract

The production of books in Nicaraguan children's literature has undergone a meaningful increase in the last twenty years. The literary criticism has not paid enough attention to its complex evolution and the existing research focuses on its origins but scarcely studies the works published after the nineties. Events such as the Sandinist Revolution and the war that took place during the seventies and eighties, the importance of oral literature and the literary tradition of the great poets and storytellers, have determined the language and children's literature in a particular way. This paper offers a compilation of the works for children produced in the last fifty years by Nicaraguan writers and illustrators including those who usually publish in the country. The paper presents a classification of the works organized around three different periods which start in 1960 with the publication of the first collections of folk poetry and stories for children to be used at schools. This analysis takes the historical and literary context as a basis for the description of topics and literary genres as well as the new trends found in children books. Particular attention is given to the study of the evolution of folk tradition taking into account the existence of a common framework of topics and features in Latin-American children's literature.