Death is an inevitable part of life and it is not spoken about enough. I believe that we need to talk about it more at home, as well as in the classroom. In my Master's thesis, I wanted to showcase to the parents and to the teachers which books concerning the topic of death are available to them. I also wanted to show how a selected book describes death, how it makes a child familiar with the notion of death, and how a child responds to the book.
In the theoretical part, I focused on the topic of death, its history and also our relationship with it. Next, I described children's understanding and experiencing of death and also their process of grieving. I presented taboo topics in youth literature and highlighted fairy tales and their significance for children. I concluded the theoretical part by presenting death in youth literature and fairy tales.
In the empirical part, I conducted a research based on a selection of nine fairy tales. I was interested in what an individual selected work offers to the reader and what is the reaction of children on the topic of death in a literary work. Thereafter I present the nine selected books that were used in the research and present individual analyses of the books, the response of a child at reading the book, and the classification of the fairy tales into individual childhood periods. A collective analysis of the results is included at the end of the thesis.
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