Browsing by Author "Rahkonen, Kaija"

The objective of this bachelor's thesis is to find out how the forest stands out in the children's picture books. Children's literature may affect the children's visions of the world. This is why it is important to examine the impressions that literature gives to us. The research material consisted of five Finnish picture books from 2000's, where one of the scenes had to be forest. How the boosk described the forest was studied by three research questions: 1. What animals or creatures do live in a forest; 2. What kind of sensations related to forest are describe; 3. What feelings the forest raise in the characters. The books were analysed related to both the text and the illustrations. The text was examined by using abductive content analysis and analysis based on the research material. The illustrations were interpreted using Ulla Rhedin's and Sirke Happonen's researchs and theories about picture book interpretation. Animals and creatures living in the forest divided books in two groups: in books that have realistic forest where live recognizable Finnish animals, and in books where creatures are more from fairy tales. There was variance how much humans belonged to forest: they were either living in there or just visiting there, or in some books there were no humans at all. Sense perceptions were also described variably. There were a lot of describing in some books, and other books were more concentrated in action and the forest was only a scene. The illustrations created atmosphere with colors, lights, shades, and movement. The forest raises much feelings in the books. They were described both in the text and in the illustrations. The most essential feelings were joy, interest, worry, fear and desire to protect the forest. The feelings were often related to some types of persons, who were quite similar in different books.