Language, Gender and Children's Fiction

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Language, Gender and Children's Fiction
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Dr Jane Sunderland
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:272
Category/Genrelinguistics
Children's literature studies - general
ISBN/Barcode 9781441138187
ClassificationsDewey:809.89282
Audience
Undergraduate
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Edition NIPPOD
Illustrations 10

Publishing Details

Publisher Continuum Publishing Corporation
Imprint Continuum Publishing Corporation
Publication Date 24 September 2012
Publication Country United States

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.

Author Biography

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

Reviews

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 *