Language, Gender and Children's Fiction

Description

This is an original, scholarly yet accessible contribution to the field of children's fiction. It focuses on gender in relation to children's fiction and the role that language plays in this relationship. Girls' and boys' reading itself is looked at, as well as the books that they encounter - including the Harry Potter series, Louis Sachar's prizewinning Holes, fairy tales and school reading schemes. The book treats fiction as fiction, using as its guiding principles the multimodality of much children's fiction; that fiction is almost always dialogic; that the feminist movement has had considerable influence on textual representations of women, men, boys and girls and that language (including what the characters say, and how, and what is said about them) is a key to the different readings of fictional texts. This will be a valuable resource for researchers in and students of linguistics, language studies and English literature.

Jane Sunderland is at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK.

This book presents current and older research into how fe/male characters and gender relations are represented in novels for child readers. From the perspective of a critical feminist approach, combined with insights from stylistics, this volume investigates a variety of children's books from the last 50 years...it also addresses the limitations of earlier studies and thus points to areas for further research and theoretical improvement. These chapters may thus serve as a broad overview for students familiarizing themselves with the history of research of gender and children's fiction. -- Monika Pleyer, Heidelberg University * The Linguist List *