In this master's thesis we are dealing with fairy tales. At the beginning we pay attention to the history of researching fairy tales and various approaches towards fairy-tale text, and then we observe how the category of childhood has developed over time and how we came to the concept of a child as we know it. In the next part we are focusing on definitions of literary theory. We try to define young adult literature which can be interpreted as a superior term towards the fairy tale, and then, with a string of definitions, we approach the fairy tale itself. It turns out that a unified definition of the fairy tale is actually elusive and it is most frequently compared with the folk tale. We focus on Dragica Haramija%s typology and highlight the importance of Hans Christian Andersen whose model represents a bridge between the classical authorial and modern fairy tale. In the following part we show how our fairy tale writers joined European development movement of storytelling. We illustrate the sunny and the sombre type of the child which have both been present in the Slovenian young adult literature since the beginning, and under these two categories we also classify Svetlana Makarovič and Anja Štefan. In order to show the quality of their works more easily, we address the issue concerning kitsch and we also put forward the critical view on the most popular classical fairy tale collections. In the analytical part we feature Vladimir Propp and alongside him we accentuate our method of drawing nearer to fairy-tale texts. We form ten fundamental truths that most distinctively appear in the fairy tales of the authors in question. We show them during the analysis and thus also confirm the hypotheses. All in all, due to complex truths that can be found in fairy tales, we prove the theory that fairy-tale texts are suitable for an adult reader who can, owing to their %adult% viewpoint, rediscover fairy tales and also see the answers to demanding existential questions.
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