| Summary: | 碩士 === 臺東師範學院 === 兒童文學研究所 === 88 === It is indubitable that death theme in the western children’s literature is quite important. For several hundred years, death description has constantly appeared in children’s literature and been regarded highly. Death image has been presented as too morbid and painful. Recently, authors’ attitudes have changed and the taboo against death description in children’s literature has been abated.
In Taiwan, young adult novels about death are a most single theme. They often emphasize how a sick child tries to get over its sickness. As western works have many death descriptions, I decide to choose some translated works to research. Because the death of family or friend is great event for anyone. Novel themes with death could easy see the metamorphosis of the young protagonists. So the subject of the research link death and initiation.
I choose Han-Sheng publishing company’s publicatiopn as my major materials. Because their publishing time came across Taiwan’s upsurge in research with death and life.
I divide my thesis into three parts. First, I try to analyze how the works handle and narrate death, and examine the protagonists‘ death concepts and attitudes. Second, I will look into the viewpoints of their manners how to cope with different problems. Finally, I will also investigate how initiation implied in the stories influences protagonists and readers as well.
This thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter One explains the motivations, purposes, methods, limitations of writing this thesis and literature reviews. Chapter Two discusses childhood and death, the initiation’s definiation, death writing history in children literature. In Chapter Three, I try to analyze when death coming,the attitude between adult and young potagonists , and to kill animal is the final goodbye to childhood. In Chapter Four, I will discuss the initiation of death events to protagonists and readers. In the last chapter, I will talk about my findings: some death descriptions in the works are too shallow to fit protagonists’ mental developments while some are full of philosophical meanings and the initiation senses are considerably strong.
Keywords: young adult novel, death, initiation
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