Transcending traditional gender roles and problem-orientated topics in contemporary Slovenian children's litrature

The represented topics in master's thesis are traditional gender roles and problem-orientated themes in selected literary works of contemporary Slovenian children's literature. In the theoretical part, the definition of children's literature and the description of how it was established in Slovenian literature is presented through theories of Marjana Kobe, Igor Saksida and Milena Mileva Blažić. Master's thesis presents us with a new term of naming literacy, which addresses various readers of different ages – cross-writing, defined by M. Blažić (2011) and S. Bechett (2017). The focus of the thesis is Slovenian contemporary prose, which we defined with the theory of Dragica Haramija (2005). We also presented Slovenian modern fairytale theory by Marjana Kobe (2000), child detective stories theory by D. Haramija (1999-2000) and (social) problem novel theory by Gaja Kos (2013). For the purposes of our research in the empirical part of the thesis, we included the topic of problem-oriented themes and factors for analyzing problematic or taboo themes theory by Igor Saksida (2014). Because of addressing the issue of gender stereotypes in contemporary Slovenian's children's literature, we defined gender stereotypes, the components of gender stereotypes and presented the stereotypical perception of male and female gender roles. The empirical part covers the analysis of six literature works of contemporary Slovenian children's literature appropriate for use in first three years of primary school education (Svetlana Makarovič: Bolje nekaj kot nič, Kajetan Kovič: Pajacek in punčka), the second three years of primary school education (Desa Muck: Anica in Jakob, Primož Suhodolčan: Maks pa Sanja) and in the last three years of primary school education (Janja Vidmar: Pink in Vinko Möderndorfer: Jaz sem Andrej). With a detailed qualitative literary analysis, we analysed which problem-oriented themes and which if any characteristics of problematic or taboo themes are presenting in selected literary works (Saksida, 2014). Our second interest was to determine if the literary characters in selected literary works are stigmatized based on their gender and how the stigmatization of the characters is presented through categories of gender stereotypes. The categories were defined based on the theory of Deaux and Lewis (1984) and research of C. L. Martin, C. H. Wood in J. K. Little (1990). The results of the analysis demonstrated, which problem-oriented themes and which if any characteristics of problem-oriented literature (Saksida, 2014) are present in selected literary works, if the gender roles of literature characters are stereotypical and if there are differences in gender roles between the younger and older generation of characters