Volume 40.3/2026 [open]
Special issue – Censorship of children's and young adult literature during the Franco and Salazar dictatorships and its impact on education
Submission Deadline: April 30th 2026
(The journal welcomes submissions on a rolling basis for the “Varia,” “Review,” and “Interview” sections.)
Guest Editors: Ângela Balça (Universidade de Évora & Centro de Investigação em Estudos da Criança da Universidade do Minho) & Ramón Tena Fernández (Universidade da Extremadura, Espanha)
Portugal and Spain recently celebrated half a century since the end of their dictatorships, however, little has been done to expose the damage of censorship, its vetoes, intentions and manipulated contents, especially with regard to children's and young adult literature.
This is very striking, because children's and young people's publications went from being despised at the start of both regimes to being the object of preferential attention from the 1950s onwards. So much so that, as certain requirements were relaxed and new decrees and laws were passed to give the appearance of freedom, the opposite happened in the field of children’s and young literature. Because in the indoctrination of young people, their ignorance and the lack of plurality of ideas were the seeds that would help their dictatorships to continue once their leaders were dead.
What was censored, how and in what way? These are questions that still need to be investigated in depth.
This monograph is open to research articles that analyse documents from the archives of Portugal and Spain in order to show the inside story of children's and young people's literature censorship. In other words, the aim is to show how each country worked, what synergies existed, what content was most persecuted and what elements centred the censors' attention in their evaluations.
The main lines of interest in this monograph are:
– Statistical studies based on children's and young people's literature censorship reports that reveal the most important evaluation items, the most persecuted genres or the most crossed out words.
– Analysis of the offices, associations and organisations that, alongside the work of the government, also censored and controlled children's and young people's literature publications.
– Research into dissident children's and young people's literature publishers.
– Archive work with the chronological evaluation of children's and young people's literature collections, censors' comments and negotiations with publishers.
– Comparative articles showing the differences between the printing proofs and the content of the published books.
– Biographies of the censors in both countries, showing their training, prestige and qualifications for the job.
– Women authors who were silenced or penalised for defending an open, pluralist and progressive literature.
– Comparisons that demonstrate the viability of publishing the same title, collection or genre, depending on the country or decade in which it was to be published.
Submissions will be accepted in Portuguese, Spanish, and English.
Authors must follow the submission and formatting guidelines of the journal: https://revistas.uminho.pt/index.php/diacritica/about/submissions
