Vom Mausekönig zum Gurkenkönig – Fantastische Kinder- und Jugendliteratur bei E. T. A. Hoffmann und Christine Nöstlinger
From the Mouse King to the Cucumber King – Fantastic Children’s and Young Adult Literature in E. T. A. Hoffmann and Christine Nöstlinger

Author(s): Mersiha Škrgić
Subject(s): Comparative Study of Literature, German Literature, Theory of Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Društvo germanista u Bosni i Hercegovini (DGuBiH) / Germanistenverband in Bosnien-Herzegowina (GViBH)
Keywords: children’s and young adult literature; fantasy; education; social criticism;
Summary/Abstract: Fantasy has a long tradition in children’s and young adult literature and, in a literaryhistorical context, is initially associated primarily with the literary fairy tales of Romanticism. While the 1960s and 1970s saw an increasing tendency toward fantastic novels with an anti-authoritarian stance, the 1990s and 2000s witnessed a veritable boom in socalled fantasy literature. This article focuses in particular on the significance of imagination for the intellectual development of the child and its role in processes of emancipation. It is assumed that fantastic worlds provide children with a form of refuge from the adult world while simultaneously supporting their development toward independence and critical thinking. A comparative analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s literary fairy tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King from the nineteenth century and Christine Nöstlinger’s socially critical children’s novel We Don’t Care about the Cucumber King (1972) aims to highlight the different functions of the fantastic in distinct literary and socio-historical contexts. Despite belonging to different epochs, both texts are regarded as classics of children’s and young adult literature. The temporal distance between the two works makes them particularly revealing examples of the development of fantastic children’s literature as well as of changing attitudes toward authoritarian educational models and the child’s potential to critically question existing worldviews and social orders.

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