The reality-fiction opposition in children's literature

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 1 University of Graz language: English abstract: Since the 1970s scholarly interest in children's literature has grown and numerous studies looking into the complexity and thematic and structural depth of the texts have been published. Simultaneously the notion of metareferentiality has sparked interest among scholars from various disciplines. Metareferentiality though not unique to the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries is said to be one of the key cultural phenomena of our time. And yet these two fields of interest namely children's literature and metareferentiality have only very rarely been studied in the same context. Metareferential elements in children's books are often seen as phenomena of dream worlds. Thus they allow a traditional non-critical reading in which the metareferential elements do not necessarily trigger medial awareness in the readers but can be explained logically and within the framework of the represented story worlds. Consequently the epistemological status of reality would not be threatened by these texts. However as this paper aims to prove such a reading (for instance) of the Alice-stories Die Unendliche Geschichte and The Book of Lost Things although undeniably possible falls short of the true scope of the texts. As will be shown all four books address the question of the status of fiction with reference to its opposition to reality albeit in different ways. In their treatment of the subject they are clearly metafictional texts with epistemological and ontological concerns that require experienced readers to fully grasp their messages. Nevertheless they are still publicly perceived as children's literature and are enjoyed by children and adults alike.After some general remarks on the genre of children's literature and on metareferentiality this paper focuses on a particular form of metarefere