| Keywords [eng] |
nonsense, children’s poetry, children’s literature, stylistics, Jack Prelutsky, Calef Brown, nonsensas, vaikų poezija, vaikų literatūra, stilistika |
| Abstract [eng] |
Both children’s literature and literary/linguistic nonsense are valued fields in their own rights: the former has much significance on the child’s development and well-being, while the latter encourages to defy conventional language use and fosters creativity in its readers. This MA thesis seeks to contribute to the growing area of study of nonsense literature, namely poetry, for children. The research aims at exploring the nonsense found in 20 poems for children written by two contemporary award-winning children’s authors, Jack Prelutsky and Calef Brown, and comparing their understanding of nonsense to that of the traditional nonsense poets, namely Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. The research questions this thesis seeks to answer are as follows: 1. How do different contemporary renowned authors approach nonsense in the same subgenre? 2. How does contemporary nonsense compare to the traditional understanding modelled after Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear? 3. Is humour always present along with nonsense in the chosen data, as suggested by several scholars (Benton, 1978; Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, 2017; Cheetham, 2019)? 4. Is nonsense more likely to occur in poems dealing with certain themes? In order to locate the nonsense present in the chosen poems, the stylistic framework draws from E. Chrzanowska-Kluczewska’s (2017) list of nonsense. All of the data was compiled and coded manually, and analysed employing qualitative and comparative methods. The quantitative results show that both poets used a similar number of nonsense triggers, regardless of the poems’ length, with syntactic ill-formedness being the least, and lack of contextual grounding and incongruities being the most popular nonsense triggers. The qualitative analysis demonstrates that nonsense was the most striking in semantic anomalies, personifications, hyperboles, and paradoxes, which lead to decontextualisation and logical deviances. Additionally, informal language, direct addresses, present tense, and named characters often appeared in these poems, helping the reader feel more connected to the given narratives. This study suggests that nonsense can be a paradoxically meaningful and attractive phenomenon in poetry for children, making the act of reading come across as a playful and engaging experience. In addition, any additional multimodal analyses or reader experience studies could be an additional benefit for this field in the future. |
