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‘Discuss Ana María Matute’s Use of Childrens’ Perspective to Comment on the Adult World’

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‘Discuss Ana María Matute’s use of childrens’ perspective to comment on the adult world’

Ana María Matute is one of the greatest contemporary Spanish novelist and short story writers that survived and experienced the Spanish civil war living through the horrors and the repression of Franco’s dictatorship. Known for her critical approach against Franco regime she used many of her writings to protest against oppression, prejudice and hypocrisy-a reaction to her own experience of the civil war. The beginning of her literary career emerged in 1940s, in a period when the literary censorship has been a major issue for Spanish writers. Matute was part of a ‘wounded generation’ as she describes the times when the literary censorship was tough …show more content…

Social concern and the prejudice of the society, as seen through the eyes of children, is another major theme which runs like a leitmotif in Matute’s tales, underling the poverty, the hierarchy based on relations of strength, the every day pain and agony provoked by lack of communication, indifference, loneliness-a portrait of a hard life described by Matute using her own experiences as a child while she was staying with her grandparents. The childrens’ world is divided in her stories in normal children and the others, ’de otras tierras,…que vivían en la parte vieja del pueblo’ y ‘que hablaban un idioma entrecortado, desconocido’. The society treats them like outsiders and this attitude of superiority is often embraced by children, (because they were told by the adults that the others are different), illustrating ‘the shock which the adult hypocrisy gives to youthful minds’. The acute consciousness of poverty and social division is remarkably portrayed by Mature through the images of the ‘other’ children who are rejected by the society because of their background and human condition. They are described as ‘chicos como al diablo, con los ojos oscuros y brillantes como cabezas de

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