engleski

Parents as Characters in Young Adult Fiction

The thesis explores types of parents and families present in recent young adult fiction. Eleven narrative wholes analyzed in this research have been written in the last fifty years. They have been chosen because they include various family situations and different parental characters. Characters found in the analyzed books are divided into three categories according to the types of families they belong to – single-parent family, family with both parents, and family without parents. Both functional and dysfunctional families have been found in the sample. The research has shown that parents as characters play an important role in recent young adult fiction, especially in terms of characterization of child and teenage characters. If parents are missing, for instance when the protagonist is an orphan, their absence also has a significant effect on the child as a character. Besides, the child-parent relationship is reflected in the plots of the analyzed novels. It has also been established that most of the analysed novels depict complete families, yet the authors of young adult fiction readily include problematic parents as characters, and they frequently address problems related to non-functional families.

parent character; children’s literature; young adult fiction; single-parent family; functional family; dysfunctional family; novel

nije evidentirano