Children’s Literature and Nation Building: The Basque Case

Abstract

The Basque Country is a stateless nation located in the western part of the Pyrenees, divided between France and Spain. The romanticist nationalist trend that emerged in Europe throughout the nineteenth century gave rise to a nationalist feeling in the Basque Country that has been fed, among others, by children’s literature. Children’s literature written in Basque throughout the twentieth century in many cases had a clear educational intentionality. The need to create a Basque community, a tradition and customs of their own during Francoism resulted in the production of a literature with a clear nationalist profile. Nevertheless, the political change after the end of the Franco dictatorship, with greater freedom and autonomy for the Basque Country, gave rise to a literary production in which those aesthetic values prevail. A literature that, from the local perspective, encompasses universal subjects in which emphasizing the specificities of the Basque is no longer necessary, as today it aims to present individual and universal conflicts.