Children's and youth biographies of Spanish writers in the framework of nonfictional reading and the construction of the contemporary literary canon

Abstract

Since the publishing boom that nonfiction books have experienced in recent decades, research has focused on the analysis of their compositional elements and the benefits they can generate in literary education. However, there is a gap between their academic projection and their use in the classroom, as there is still a preference for fiction books. On the other hand, there is a clear tendency of some titles to hybridization and the approach of informative text to fiction resources, in order to reinforce the links between the learning of objective contents and the search for the reader's empathy through characters with whom he/she can identify. This is the place occupied by children's biographies, which constitute a fundamental material for the transmission of the canon and, at the same time, attract the reader's attention through mixed formulas between the juvenile narrative and the non-fiction book. For this reason, this study analyzes a wide corpus of children's biographies of Spanish writers to guide the mediator in the process of text selection and to analyze the place they occupy in the construction of the current canon.