ABOUT DRAGONS AND CHIVALRY: MEDIEVAL LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN READERS THROUGH PICTURE BOOKS

Considering the cultural and literary tradition that contextualizes the characters of the dragon as an evil beast and the knight as a heroic figure, and taking into account the features of the current picture books, this paper aims to analyze, through a qualitative and contrastive study, a selection of thirty representative titles from a corpus based on thematic and formal criteria; with the aim of observing how these characters from the medieval and legendary tradition are represented in illustrated books and what implications this has for the role of children's literature as a preserver of the literary heritage. We study the narrative configuration and intertextual relations of works that preserve and at the same time update the literary heritage in favor of reading and interpretation processes typical of postmodernity. It is concluded that the picture books analyzed present diverse rewritings of the most iconic figures of medieval literature, based on the initial opposition between notions of the adult or conventional world (cliches and literary motifs) and the children's universe, in significant parodic games with tradition, and this type of reading is vindicated within the framework of literary education.