The theoretical part of the master’s thesis presents children and youth literature in Austria and introduces the so-called “absent author” (Dovič, 2005) Anka Luger (1953–) along with her five picture books. Furthermore, we also introduce picture book definitions from various authors, book forms as well as the relation between text and illustrations in picture books. We define speech and thinking and the various stages of children’s speech development, as well as discuss how picture books affect children’s speech and their learning abilities. Educators, psychologist and literary science many times point out that picture books can have a great effect on children before they learn to read and during the initial reading period. The picture-book age (in German das Bilderbuchalter) is an internationally established term that emphasizes the role of picture books in children, and also reminds the parents of its importance and potential.
The empirical part includes a visual and literary analysis of the five picture books. Our aim was to determine if according to the theory of Marjana Kobe the motives and subject as well as the morphological and structural characteristics of short modern stories, match the picture books of Anke Luger. We also try to investigate, if the visual and verbal part of the picture books, as defined by Marie Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, corresponds with the picture books of our author. The results have shown that for the most part, the characteristics of short modern stories match the analysed picture books and that the visual and verbal part, or, in other words, the illustrations and the text complement each other well.
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