engleski

Parallel Worlds in Children's Fantasy Fiction from Carroll to Lewis

The thesis presents an analysis of a selection of children’s fantasy novels from Lewis Carroll to Clive Staples Lewis, based on the idea of parallel worlds. The books belong to the Golden Age of children’s literature (mid-19th to mid-20th century). The corpus includes: “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by Lyman Frank Baum, “The Enchanted Castle” by Edith Nesbit, “Peter and Wendy” by James Matthew Barrie, “The Hobbit” by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and “The Chronicles of Narnia” (with emphasis on “The Magician’s Nephew”, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “The Last Battle”) by Clive Staples Lewis. A.A. Milne’s collection of stories “Winnie-the-Pooh” is also taken into consideration. The pairs of realistic and fantastic parallel worlds are analyzed and compared. A classification of kinds of characters found in the depicted literary worlds is developed and exemplified. It is shown how the notion of the fantasy world in parallel world fiction changes over time. Intertextuality of the constructed literary worlds is found to be an important feature of all the analyzed books, confirming the insight that it is a common feature of fantasy fiction in general.

fantasy; children’s literature; parallel worlds; intertextuality; narrative fiction; novel.

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