This bachelor’s thesis examines the reception of legends concerning ghosts, death, and other supernatural and unexplained phenomena. It focuses on the question of why different listeners and readers interpret narratives differently and how their reception is influenced by personal experience, religion, family environment, age, spatial and temporal context, and the social acceptability of particular interpretations. The thesis first introduces the legend as a folklore genre and presents theories of folklore reception. The reception of written legends is then situated within the framework of empirical literary studies, particularly Siegfried J. Schmidt’s model of the literary system (1980) and Urška Perenič’s (2010) original modification of the model with regard to Slovenian material.
The folkloristic, fieldwork-based part of the study draws on semi-structured individual and group interviews conducted across generations. The analysis shows that participants interpret supernatural events through rationalisation, with or without reference to personal experience, as well as through vernacular religiosity, spatial and temporal contexts, and social relations. These modes of interpretation frequently overlap, making it impossible to categorise an individual participant unequivocally as someone who either believes or does not believe a particular narrative. The intergenerational transmission of legends also encompasses ways of evaluating experiences, assessing their plausibility, and deciding to whom a particular narrative may appropriately be told.
The literary-theoretical part of the thesis, situated within Slovene studies, examines selected legends from two volumes of the Glasovi collection: Marija Cvetek’s Naš voča so včas zapodval (1993) and Nada Ravbar Morato’s Kruh in ribe (2007). The analysis demonstrates that reception is shaped by narrative perspective, titles, genre characteristics, dialectal representation, spatial and temporal markers, and the editorial design of the collection. By bringing together the study of the living storytelling event and the literary-theoretical analysis of the written legend, the thesis contributes to an integrated understanding of folklore reception and emphasises that meanings emerge through the interaction between a narrative and its recipient.
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