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Mukherjee, Sarah Jane; Hunt, Sally and Leedham, Maria
(2024).
Abstract
Children’s and Young Adult (YA) literature offers ‘windows and mirrors’ onto the world (Bishop 1990), worldviews and experiences (windows) and self-reflections (mirrors). This paper focuses on YA fiction, which provides resources for identity building, as well as acting as a guide in navigating the world. Previous corpus linguistics research (Hunt, 2015; in press) has shown highly gendered representations, as indicated through the linguistic patterning, of characters’ appearance and agency in best-selling children’s literature series (including The Famous Five, by Enid Blyton; The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis). However, there is a paucity of work on representations of characters in recent young adult fiction using a CADS perspective. Therefore, little is known about the identity resources made available for young people in the literature they read as construed by the hidden discourse patterns of the language choices. This paper aims to address this gap and identify the discourses underlying the language patterns in relation to appearance and agency.
This presentation shares a CADS investigation of the ‘windows and mirrors’ on gender representations of the characters and the worlds constructed by female and male authors. This work draws on a newly-compiled corpus of the 50 most commercially-successful books for young adults (11-18 years) in the UK over a 5-year period (2017-2022).
Our analysis involves the investigation of impact of the role of gender in linguistic patterns in a unique corpus of c.5 million words. These findings were shared with and enriched by the insights of secondary school students and their school librarians, in focus groups and interviews.
The paper will report mainly on the following research questions:
1. What gendered patterns in characters’ agency and appearance are constructed in YAF?
2. What differences and overlaps exist in the fictional worlds created by female and male authors?
To answer the first question, we searched for collocates of the gendered nouns girl, woman, boy and man, and extracted the attributive modifiers of appearance preceding them. Those with the highest LogDice scores were investigated more fully in concordance lines for discourse patterns.
Female-authored (n=34) and male-authored books (n=16) were analysed separately through Wmatrix semantic tagging to explore what makes each subcorpus distinctive.
RQ1: Findings reveal interesting correlations between characters’ gender and physical appearance, as shown in the following collocates:
- girls: little, pretty, young, beautiful, baby
- boys: little, old, young, tall, invisible
- women: young, old, beautiful, blonde, elderly
- men: young, old, tall, dead, big
Insights around gendered agency will also be explored in the presentation.
RQ2: Female and male authors constructed starkly distinct worlds in terms of the prominent semantic categories e.g. emotions and warfare respectively.
Findings were shared with young people and school librarians and their responses will be drawn on in the presentation.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
