The Mark of Fairy Tales on Galician Literature for Children and Young Adults

This chapter conducts a historical overview of Galician literature for children and young adults, analysing the most representative works from each of the different established periods of Galician literature in different ways. The concepts of ‘rewriting’, ‘versions’, and ‘adaptations’ will be taken into account, as well as Genette’s distinction between types of transtextuality and their uses as defined by Valriu. This paper looks at how the roles of the characters change, how the stereotypes of witches, fairies, princesses, and others are modified, and how contexts are modernized for different purposes such as provoking a parodic effect, subverting and/or humanising the characters, or instilling certain values or ideologies in young readers. In this way, this paper offers a general overview of the mark that fairy tales have left on Galician literature for children and young adults, and the influence and vitality that they have as a source of recreation, subversion, and deconstruction for writers of children’s and young adult literature.