Comparative analysis of the poverty motif in picture books

The first part of the thesis will include a definition and presentation of youth literature and youth literature with thematic issues. I will then turn to the problematic issues of today's life, in particular the problem of scarcity, which I will intertwine with Oscar Wilde's political-philosophical essay The Human Soul under Socialism (1993). The writer's complex creativity and thinking is largely conditioned by his talent, maturity, sensitivity and sense of the beautiful; but also, to a large extent, by the events of his lifetime and the environment and times in which he lived. A short presentation of his life will follow. This will be followed by the presentation of a groundbreaking literary work of youth literature, the diary of Anne Frank - not a picture book, but an extraordinary literary text focusing on life in wartime circumstances, thus fully embracing the problematic themes in general (disease, poverty, social isolation, war, etc.). I will then introduce the picture book and it’s main features, and move on to the picture book depictions of the works of the Slovenian classic Ivan Cankar, whose great role model was the previously mentioned Irish author Oscar Wilde. I will present Cankar's works in pictorial form and those that refer to him (Blažić v Čeh Steger, Pulko in Zemljak Zones, 2018). Then I will continue with a description of two Slovenian picture books in which the theme of poverty is prevalent: the picture book The Seamstress and the scissors by Dragotin Kette and the picture book Near there lives the girl by Ida Mlakar Črnič. This will be followed by a presentation of the education and work of the Swedish academic, literary critic and writer of children's and young people's literature Maria Nikolajeva. I will conclude the theoretical part by describing the main aspects that Maria Nikolajeva examines when she analyses picture books. These are: setting, characterisations, perspectives, temporality and modality (Nikolajeva and Gostinčar Cerar, 2003). In the empirical part of the thesis, I will take these aspects into account in my own comparative analyses. In the second ‒ empirical part of the thesis, a comparative analysis of Slovenian picture books on poverty will be carried out in five parts, from 1848 to 2021: 1848‒1918 Fran Miličinski ‒ Tolovaj Mataj: Three servants; 1918‒1941 France Bevk ‒ Grivar's children; 1941‒1991; Ivan Cankar ‒ A bunch of dried pears; 1991‒2004 Charles Perrault ‒ The shoeless cat and 2004‒2021 Pergar Saša ‒ About the city and the field mouse. I will choose the most representative picture book for each period. There will be 5 picture books to analyse. I will analyse them with quotes from verbal and visual text (illustrations). Finally, I will summarise the findings from the theoretical and empirical work in one paragraph and also analyse them from the perspective of early childhood education. This will be followed by a brief reflection on the future ‒ will there be more social cases in the world? Can we optimistically dismiss this item and say that there will be fewer of them