Tales and lessons: texts for nineteenth-century children in Argentina

Abstract

In the middle of the nineteenth century the first schoolbooks began to be published in Argentine, and later, the first book of Children’s Literature appeared. However, although these two cultural objects were contemporaries they reached diferent development in the first fifty years of their publication. The aim of this article is to revise the postulates about the modern quality of these types of texts which emerged simultaneously with Argentina’s modernization process, in the period when the country became a national state, founded indeed on the transformation of the political and social institutions. The article also explores the factors that have influenced the continuous growth that edition’s schoolbooks have maintained, based in their condition to alphabetize, and the minor importance granted to short infantile stories because of their amusement related style. Consequently, this study of the concepts about childhood in nineteenth Argentina’s society is meant to explain the differences in the promotion, edition and reception of each type of text. Finally, an approach to the analysis of the drawbacks of feminine printings is proposed, and it considers the conjecture that the negligence of infantile Literature could had been to this factor, and in fact, as a proof of manifested apathy towards the women’s Literature.