Fantasy literature in Brazilian education: prejudices, challenges, and expectations

Abstract

 The so-called fantasy literature has a considerable presence in Brazilian schools and represents an attractive theme for young readers. Although supported by terminologies such as “folklore” and “wonderful tale”, it resists to the outdated efforts to become the teaching of literature closer to the preference for the “realism”. The contemporary cultural panorama makes the printed book assume a place of fetishised object, on the one hand, or an object replaced and left to oblivion, on the other. As if the precarious historical links of Brazilians with books were not enough, there are still difficulties of several orders and gradations for a literary work could reach its probable reader. In this paper, I write as a researcher but also as a writer of books for children and young people, and present some points of reflection on the particularities of schools with respect to reading and writing, in a broad spectrum.