María Teresa León's Fiction for Children and Young People: an Example of Reading for Literary Education in the Silver Age

Abstract

The analysis of María Teresa León's work for children allows us to situate this author of the 1927 generation in the context of the renewal of children's literature during the Spanish Silver Age, a period in which important educational changes took place at the same time as women gained prominence in the public and cultural sphere. Intertextuality and female protagonism are evident from her first published book, Cuentos para soñar, included in the catalogue of the traveling library of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. And in Rosa-Fría, patinadora de la luna, the collection of stories that forms one of her most widely distributed collections, the alliance between tradition and the avant-garde reaches its peak in a prose with dreamlike and surrealist accents that goes beyond a reader determined by age to open up to the sensoriality and rupture that characterise the modernity of the time.