Literary travelogue in German young adult fantasy (on the example of M. Glaser's novels)

The given article attempts at investigating M. Gläser’s novels, contemporary German writer whose books “The Book Jumpers” (Die Buchspringer) and “Emma, Faun and forgotten Book” (Emma, der Faun und das vergessene Buch) are examples of German young adult literature. For such kind of books, the author proposes a new term - “literary travelogue”, first used by Chernyak to describe the works by M. Gläser. Besides that, the features of the young adult genre are analyzed, as well as its relation to children and adult literature. The article also tries to place M. Gläser’s works within the German literary tradition. M. Gläser’s novels are compared to those by K. Funke, another German writer in whose books the reading and writing of books is highly estimated. But if in Funke’s “Ink Trilogy” the literary world once created cease to obey its creator and follows the laws of its own, in Gläser’s novels the main accent is on the readers’ abilities to interfere with the plot and the abilities of the books to change ordinary life. In the first novel, the female protagonist travels across literary worlds, and the second novel is set as a dialogue with Jane Austen’s works, the protagonists (Emma and Darcy) reenact the famous love collision. Thus, Gläser’s novels are literature-centred which allows to relate them to literary travelogues. Intertextuality is M. Gläser’s main creative tool, considered as one of the author’s goals - to arouse young adults’ interest in reading. The article concludes that M. Gläser’s books via their intertextuality perform an educational function for their readers. Moreover, the dialogue with Jane Austen allows M. Gläser’s novels be part of a global trend connected with the culs of British novels, thus adding a certain amount of complexity to the works in question.