Thematic transformation in children's books (18-21th century)

Children's literature emerges as literary products that take the concepts of child and childhood to their centre and guide the child's adventure of discovering life. The focus of children's literature is on the child. Therefore, it tries to enter the child's world and guide him by taking into account the child's interest, needs and imagination. At the same time, it enables the child to develop his/her regular reading skills, to develop aesthetic pleasures and to make correct and healthy choices in both reading and social context in the later stages of his/her life. The works examined in this present research are limited to a total of thirteen children's novels written in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. In the study conducted through qualitative research, the findings have been attained by document analysis. In this study, the thematic transformation elements in the following children's works separated by centuries have been examined and some various detections have been found: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels from the 18th century; Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, Johanna Spyri's Heidi, Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island from the 19th century, and from the 20th century Michael Ende's Momo, Eleanor, H. Porter's Pollyanna, James Matthew Barrie's Peter Pan, Gülten Dayıoğlu's Children of the Ray Age, Antoine de Saint Exupery's Little Prince, Jose Mauro de Vasconcelos' Sugar Orange. In the introduction part of the thesis, the purpose and importance, method, scope, limitation and problem status of the research have been explained. While the second part reveals the method of the study, in the third part the findings obtained from the works explored and the comments on the findings are given, and finally the content analysis and the projection of the thematic transformation to the novels are examined within the subtitles. As a result of the research, it has been established that the phenomenon of religion in the works of the 18th century, adventure and science in the works of the 19th century, the effects of world wars on people and the themes that have evolved into individualization in the works of the 20th century.