Language and Style of Underground Children's Books

Kubova, Katerina: Language and Style of Underground Children's Books: The Thesis. Prague: The Faculty of Arts of The Charles University, Institute of Czech Language and Theory of Communication, 2011. Thesis Advisor: Prof. PhDr. Petr Mares, CSc. This thesis aims to examine the linguistic and stylistic aspects of Czech underground literature for children. In the first part, it focuses on the specifics of children's literature and on the term "child aspect" which serves as a criterion for further analysis of selected texts. The thesis also presents selected writers of children's literature and their work. The linguistic and stylistic analysis is largely based on the book Současná stylistika (The Contemporary Czech Stylistics), which characterizes the individual linguistic levels of a fictional text. Texts for children, written by Egond Bondy and Ivan Martin Jirous, the most prominent figures of the Czech cultural underground of the 1970's and 1980's, are analyzed. Finally, the linguistic and stylistic features of the samizdat anthology Čert má kopyto… (The Devil Has a Hoof…), which represents a sum of the Czech underground literature for children, are examined, determining texts that meet both the criterion of the children's literature and the criterion of the underground poetics, and therefore..