The structure of genre in the Croatian children’s literature in the decade following the wwii

Abstract

Croatian children’s literature belonging to the decade after the year of 1945 is insufficiently researched within the Yugoslav context, and is often implicitly attributed genre definitions (namely, it is part of the Lovrak era which, according to Milan Crnković, lasts from 1933 to 1956) such as the dominance of prose, which does not correspond to the state of affairs. It was a unique historical situation in which the literary tradition was radically rejected, where one vigorously sought out new children’s literature, which had to serve the creation of a new child while still in vogue; for a child in which the seed of the future new socialist man had to be laid, the idea was to seek expression in a song, vigor, drive. Only with insight into the genre structure dominated by poetry (and above all the poem as a narrative type along with short hymn poems) and research into the causes of such a situation in literature will shed light on the deep connection between the structure of children’s literature, as well as the social and historical context of it. It is shown that very soon the revolutionary enthusiasm had slid into crafts and part-time earnings, ultimately having taken on such proportions that the phenomenon had to be regulated by law.