A literatura juvenil reescrita : mulherzinhas e o senhor March

Abstract

The present thesis aims to discuss the intertextual relationship between two foreign books: Litte Women and March. The former was written by Louisa May Alcott and the latter by Australian author Geraldine Brooks. Our main objective is the description of the juvenile literature and the understanding of how the changing of elements, when retelling a story, can change its audience. Through bibliographical research, we discuss the cultural and historical construction of childhood and adolescence, and the creation of an American juvenile literature based on the American Conduct books. At first, we present the ideas of how adolescence became a social category and why people started to publish books to this public. This reflections are brought through the concepts of Nelly Novaes Coelho, Luís Groppo, João Luís Ceccantini, Jaime Padrino, and others. Then, we show the difference between Little Women and the Conduct books that were being produced to young people back in the nineteenth century; also we find out that it is considered the first American juvenile book. Later, we go through the concepts of intertextuality and palimpsest, according to Julia Kristeva and Gérard Genette. In the next chapter, we analyze both stories according to predetermined elements: narrator, themes, characters, focus, problem and its solution, and the image of the young characters. Finally, we focus on the difference between narrator and its focalization in both books, based on the studies by Gérard Genette and Norman Friedman. The description of these differences enables us to understand the appearance of a new implied reader when Little Women s plot is retold in March