Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15516/cje.v19i0.2427
Influence of Popular Culture on Character Formation in the Contemporary Croatian Children's Novel
Andrijana Kos-Lajtman
; Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb
Kristina Slunjski
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
The influence of popular culture on the contemporary children's novel is multifaceted and complex, and is reflected in all levels of discourse. This paper discusses the elements and strategies of popular culture which we can observe in the contemporary Croatian children's novel (more specifically, novels published from 1970 up to the present, that is, in the period in which popular culture had a remarkable boom), which are visible in the concepts of designing novelistic characters. Through analytical insight into the characters of individual children's novels written in that period, with respect to various aspects such as complexes of world-views and ideas, linguistic habitus, social and psychological basis of characters, the child-adult opposition, the role of gender stereotypes, and determination by typical motifs of modern pop-culture practices (primarily related to urban areas as centres of entertainment and consumption), we detect the manner and extent of the influence of popular culture in the context of the modern Croatian children's novel. This is, on the one hand, considered given the general attitude of popular culture and literature for children (both older, and here thematised, contemporary) and, on the other hand, connected to postmodern determinants of contemporary social and cultural (especially literary), practices.
Keywords
characters; consumerism; contemporary Croatian children's novel; popular culture; postmodernism
Hrčak ID:
184035
URI
Publication date:
27.4.2017.
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