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Abstract: My graduation thesis focuses on two novels: Lois Lowry's Number the Stars and John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The time setting of both novels is during the Holocaust, which also plays a big part in the fates of the characters. At the beginning a historical background is explained, as well as criticism of Boyne's novel. Then a short overview of trends towards writing about social issues in children's books is given. The main part of the graduation thesis is explaining my initial thesis that Boyne and Lowry use a special type of innocence in their works to highlight the horrors of the Holocaust. The process of proving the thesis involved in-depth study of both works, where it was discovered that innocence in their works is embodied in the child protagonists and their naïve, innocent, brave and sometimes ignorant views on the given situations.
Keywords: Number the Stars, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Holocaust, children during the Holocaust, rescue of Danish Jews, innocence, horrors of the Holocaust
Published in DKUM: 06.11.2014; Views: 2805; Downloads: 229
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