Role of animals in the selected works of Franček Rudolf

Franček Rudolf is a versatile writer of many literary works for children and adolescents. The purpose of the M.A thesis is to present some of his works where animals occur as the main literary figures. I was interested in the role of animals in the selected texts, their features, the organization of fantastic and realistic world and in the presence of fantastic elements in the texts. For this purpose, the theorethical part of the thesis first outlines some essential features of Young Adult Literature and its genres. I provided a more detailed account of the role of animals in Slovene Young Adult and Children's Literature. Since I was also interested in children's response to the selected work written by Franček Rudolf, the theoretical part also describes receptive abilities of children. The first part of the thesis is rounded off by the author's biography and bibliography. In the empirical part of the thesis I did research on the role of animals in Franček Rudolf's works by analyzing thirty of his texts. I established that animals were mostly presented in their natural, biological role. In part, it has to do with anthropomorphism, as they keep their animal abilities and characteristics, while at the same time there are moments when they think and feel the way humans do. In the analyzed works one-dimensional reality prevails. Fantastic elements and the dimension of reality are intertwined and combined to form a whole. The activity is most frequently set in a realistic environment, and the same goes for the time reference. The fantastic element found in the texts is represented by animal speech as well as the unreal actions of the literary figures. What surprised me was literary nonsense encountered in the majority of the texts analyzed. There, the author introduces humour and dynamism by means of extraordinary and unexpected twists and turns and play on words. In the final part of the thesis, I wished to establish, drawing on the treatment of the selected text in the second and fourth classes of primary school, whether there were between the two age groups any differences in the perception and comprehension of the text and of the animal fictional character. Based on the questionnaire and the pupils' responses I found out that both groups recognized animals as literary heroes. The major difference occured in their ability to identify with a fictional character. The second-year pupils were not able to recognize the characteristics of the main literary figure that they could identify with. By contrast, most of the older pupils were able to do that despite certain markedly negative features of the main literary figure. The results also imply that fourth-year pupils are capable of differentiating between reality and imaginary world to a greater extent than second-year pupils