With small notes short stories for children are made: Maria Cecília Correia and her forgotten writing

Abstract

This essay, with a hermeneutic root and monographic contours, focuses on the literary personality Maria Cecília Correia (1919–1993). She is one of the writers –alongside with Lília da Fonseca, Maria Lamas or Maria Lúcia Namorado, for example –who, despite her experiential / literary discretion, should be understood as one of the ‘nodal/figurative points’of the History of Portuguese children’s literature, particularly during the period of the Estado Novo (1926–1974), and whose writing, until the date, has not yet received the deserved critical reception (namely, in the academic field). In an attempt to single out the literary production of this writer and not forgetting to point out some relevant aspects of her biobibliographical path, namely to clarify the personal context of her writing composition and the repercussions that it had in her literary creation, we proceeded to a textual analysis of her eight books for children, focusing on their main ideothematic (childhood, humanism, diversity, nature, among others) and most relevant rhetorical-stylistic mechanisms (adjectives, metaphor, among others). Generally speaking, these texts reflect the deep connection to everyday life, in particular children’s daily life, looked at and genuinely recreated in a lively, natural and spontaneous discourse, through which it approaches the potential reader important themes such as difference, for example. These and other aspects, which we tried to deepen in this study, allow us to clarify and recognize the irrefutable presence and meaning of Maria Cecília Correia in the History of Portuguese Children’s Literature.