The edition of children’s literature in Fortaleza

regional variations and cultural mediations

Abstract

This article analyses, from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology perspective, the editing and circulation processes of children´s books in the city of Fortaleza, located in the northeast of Brazil. It focuses on the practices of agents and institutions which act in constituting a relatively autonomous editorial space. With empirical material, it elects the editions of Demócrito Rocha and the Editora Dummar, companies linked to the Grupo de Comunicação O Povo. The tested hypothesis is that the singularity of a regional space is paradoxically conquered through heteronomy. In this perspective, the action of the State is fundamental in the editorial production, since the classification of the themes of popular culture, tradition and patrimony to the purchase of books and public notices destined to the sector.  This system identifies promotion of local culture as a way of ‘joining parts’ of the Brazilian literary nation. The space for children´s book edition in Fortaleza constituted itself, therefore, in a subfield of dependent and peripheral production inside a national space also dependent and peripheral regarding the transactional linguistic spaces.