A narratological perspective to children literature focus on Sevim Ak's works

For many years, children's literature has primarily been considered within the field of educational sciences; however, examining these texts in the light of modern critical theories is necessary in order to reveal their literary qualities. Evaluating children's literature merely as texts that convey content or serve instructional purposes leads to an insufficient examination of their narrative structures and aesthetic values. This situation makes it necessary to reconsider the position of children's literature within literary studies. This study aims to analyze Sevim Ak's works of children's literature through a text-centered approach within the framework of narratology. As the main theoretical framework, the categories developed by Gérard Genette in Narrative Discourse, order, duration, frequency, mood, and voice, are adopted, and the approaches of other theorists working within the tradition of structural linguistics are also incorporated. The structural features that need to be examined alongside content in children's literature, particularly the identity of the narrator, point of view, the organization of time, and narrative levels, constitute the main analytical framework of the study. The objects of analysis consist of six children's books by Sevim Ak written for preschool, primary school, and middle school levels. In addition to textual analyses, the relationship between visual text and verbal text in illustrated children's books is also examined within a narratological context. The findings indicate that children's narratives are not merely texts producing instructional content, but rather present strong literary structures through their narrative organization, temporal constructions, and narrator choices. In this respect, the study demonstrates that analyzing children's literature within the framework of modern critical theories opens new possibilities for interpretation and analysis in the field. It is expected that this study will contribute to a more systematic evaluation of children's literature within literary studies and provide a basis for further narratology-based research.