Garden in Children's Literature - its presentation, role and symbolism in The Secret Garden and Tom's Midnight Garden

In my diploma thesis, I deal with the topic of the garden as it is presented in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and Ann Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden. In the beginning, I discuss the reasons for the attractivity of this topic among children's authors in general, and introduce Burnett and Pearce. In the following chapters I focus mainly on the role of the gardens in the characters' lives, showing the positive effect they have on the characters, helping them to gradually change for the better. I concern myself with several themes, including the way and the circumstances in which the two gardens are discovered, the setting of the stories, and the magical aspects of both gardens. I also deal with the differences in the perception of time and with the interconnectivity of time levels in the stories. At the end of this thesis there is a chapter devoted to the way both authors present their gardens and on the means they use for their descriptions