My Diploma Thesis has a theoretical character. I dealt with fairy tales as a genre. I worked only with the folkloric fairy tales that are different from the modern ones in the way of universality. In the first part I looked for characteristic features of these stories from the literary and psychological point of view. I focused on time and place expression and how the fairy tale deals with the identity of characters and typical phenomenon of the good and the bad. Through these principles children can easily identify with the heroes of stories and therefore they help to solve specific developmental crisis and also to reach individual autonomy and integrity. For me, the theoretical basis was psychoanalysis and thus I followed the fairy tales theory of Bruno Bettelheim. I used this theory in the second part of my thesis as well. The interpretation of four fairy tales: Litte Red Riding-hood (Červená Karkulka), Jack an Jill (Perníková chaloupka), The Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Sněhurka) and Hrnečku, vař! are given. It is about the determination of the main topic and the interpretation of individual motives. Besides the different options how to interpret it I also compared the different versions of these stories. At the end I tried to have a critical view on Bettelheim's approach and also to find...

This study analyzes Lloyd Alexander's The Prydain Chronicles through a Jungian lens. Previous scholarship on Alexander's works has briefly considered archetypal criticism, but not extensively. Bruno Bettelheim's thoughts are used intermittently throughout the thesis. This study concentrates on Taran's individuation process, the discovery of true selfhood, and his consequent development of a whole psyche.

Using an analysis of the creation of the character Dan Kelly in my play, risk, I argue that fairytale characters work as more than personage representations. They function on a big canvas for the audience; they carry large chains of association. Given this, I then propose that the human response is to infer additional meaning, meaning beyond the scope of plot and immediate character interaction - the audience infers symbolic meaning, ‘amplifying’ what is there into more. They enter a ‘generative empty space’ within the play where they infer or ‘unfold’ more meaning. In creating this ‘greater tale’, they are engaged beyond their personal ‘horizon of understanding’, and so, ‘take in’ the work through a heightened perceptual acuity. Therefore, I pursued the idea of making space for the operation of this process, of leveraging the creation of meaning around a character. My inquiry led me to believe that a powerful way to do this was through absence rather than presence and silence rather than sound; and this had a profound impact on my choice of form for Dan Kelly: he progressed, through a number of stages, from reportage to a digital representation.

The aim of this study is to draw new perspectives to the theoretic approach towards the complex nature of the modern fairy tale genre and its transformation. The study is exemplified by two books by Alan A. Milne about Winnie-the-Pooh (1926-1928), Tove Jansson’s eight books about the Moomintrolls (1945-1970) and Eno Raud’s four books about three funny creatures called “Nakstitrallid” in Estonian (1972-1982). In this thesis, I examine the disputable problem of defining the fairy tale genre in modern literature and refer to the history of the genre and storytelling tradition that have indirectly inspired all three authors in their decision to turn for fairy tale as a genre. Applying the poetical analysis, I argue that these authors contributed to the continuity of fairy tales by creating the link between folkloric heritage, novelistic literary expression and children’s imagination. This study can therefore be considered as topological, however it does not pretend to introduce the complete systematic definition of the genre as the thesis’ format does not allow such in-depth investigation. In the first chapter, ‘Archaic world stimulation in modern fairy tale’, I examine the dominating literary categories that refer to the folk fairy tale intertext: Bakhtin’s concept of ‘chronotope’ – category of time and space, system of fictional allegoric characters and category of fantastic.  In the second chapter, ‘Modern fairy tales from perspective of children’s literature’, I analyze the books of Milne, Jansson and Raud in the scope of narratological and aesthetic categories of children’s literature. The folkloric laughter intertextually reproduced by naïvism of the Moomins, the Naksitralls, and Winnie-the-Pooh’s friends, while folkloric collective hero is presented by universal harmony of a happy family and child-like protagonists. I came to the conclusion that poetics of folklore fairy tale still exists in these books through the intertextual dialogue. Modernism as literary method re-evaluates folkloric aspects such as nonlinear time, the blurred boarders between individual and cosmos, material and spirit, text and reality. Every new artistically unique fairy tale world resembles the new stage of the genre development. The more innovative is the story, the more sophisticated can be its poetics.