My girl, old girl: Keywords, Collocations and Gender  in British Children’s Fiction

Elizabeth Poynter

doi:10.24071/joll.v24i1.7497

My girl, old girl: Keywords, Collocations and Gender in British Children’s Fiction

Elizabeth Poynter^(1*),

(1) Carnegie School of Education, Leeds Beckett University
(*) Corresponding Author

Abstract

The importance of children’s literature in the development of gender roles and gender identity is widely acknowledged. In the mid twentieth century books were the primary medium for most children, and the popular British fiction of the period is often considered to present strong gender stereotypes, despite the enormous social changes taking place (World War II, the Women's Movement). This study builds on previous content analysis and small-scale linguistic analysis to explore the extent of such stereotyping. It uses two digitised corpora, one of adventure books aimed at girls and boys, and the other of books for girls, from the period 1930-1970. With the corpus linguistics software LancsBox it examines keywords of each corpus against the other, and further against a contemporary (1961) corpus of general English prose. It then looks at collocations of GIRL, BOY, WOMAN, MAN. While there are some distinctions between the two genres, there are also considerable similarities. Some gender stereotyping occurs in use of reporting verbs and physical description, but there is no clear polarisation of gender roles in the collocations, and females are referenced more frequently in the adventure texts than in general prose of the same period. This tends to support previous findings, that the popular children's literature of this period is more nuanced than is often assumed.

Keywords

gender stereotypes; children’s literature; keywords; collocations

Full Text:

PDF

References

and Palmer, S.K. (2023) Gender Socialization, Family Leadership and the Invisible Father in Children's Literature. Journal of Family Issues 44 (5), pp.1343-1357

Auchmuty, R. (1992). A World of Girls. London: The Women’s Press.

Baker, P. (2004). Querying Keywords: Questions of Difference, Frequency and Sense in Keywords Analysis. Journal of English Linguistics 32(4), pp. 346-359. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424204269894

Baker, P. (2008). Sexed texts: Language, gender and sexuality. London: Equinox.

Baker, P. (2010). Will Ms Ever Be as Frequent as Mr? A Corpus-based Comparison of Gendered Terms across Four Diachronic Corpora of British English. Gender and Language 4 (1), pp. 125-149

Baker, P. (2014). Using Corpora to Analyze Gender. London: Bloomsbury.

Brezina, V. (2018). Statistics in corpus linguistics. Cambridge University Press

Brezina, V., Weill-Tessier, P. & McEnery, A. (2020). LancsBox v. 6.0 [software]. Retrieved from http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox

Butts, D. (2018). Shaping boyhood: British Empire builders and adventurers. In Hunt, P. (Ed) International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature 2nd Ed Vol 1, (pp. 340-351). London, New York: Routledge.

Butts, D. (2021) Biggles - Hero of the Air. In D. Jones and T. Watkins (Eds) A Necessary Fantasy? The Heroic Figure in Children's Popular Culture. (pp. 137-152). Lond, New York: Routledge.

Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. and Moon, R. (2010). 'Curvy, Hunky, Kinky’: Using Corpora as Tools for Critical Analysis. Discourse and Society 21(2): pp. 99-133

Čermáková, A. and Mahlberg, M. (2021). Gender Inequality and Female Body Language in Children's Literature. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36(2), pp. 72-77

https://doi.org/10.1023/b:sers.0000018892.26527.ea

Eyre, F. (1972). British children's books in the twentieth century. London: Longman.

Gehrau, V., Brüggemann, T., & Handrup, J. (2016). Media and occupational aspirations: The effect of television on career aspirations of adolescents. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 60(3), pp. 465-483. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2016.1203319

Gablasova, D., Brezina, V. & McEnery, T. (2017). Collocations in Corpus-Based Language Learning Research: Identifying, Comparing and Interpreting the Evidence. Language Learning 67(S1), pp. 155-179

Hunt, S. (2011). The Discoursal Construction of Female Physical Identity in Selected Works in Children's Literature. (PhD Thesis). Rhodes University

Hunt, S. (2015). Representations of gender and agency in the Harry Potter Series. In P. Baker and T. McEnery (Eds) Corpora and discourse studies, (pp. 266-284). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431738.0017

Hunt, S. (2017). Boast and Bellow, Giggle or Chatter: Gender and Verbs of Speech in Children's Fiction. Retrieved from https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/college-artslaw/corpus/conference-archives/2017/general/paper306.pdf

Hunt, S. (2019). Sugar and Spice or Snails and Tails: The Gendered Representation of Emotion in Children’s Fiction. (International Corpus Linguistics Conference) Cardiff University, Cardiff 22-26 July 2019.

Koller, V. and Mautner, G. (2004). Computer applications in critical discourse analysis. In C. Coffin, A. Hewings and K. O'Halloran (Eds) Applying English grammar: Functional and corpus approaches, (pp. 216-228). Abingdon: Routledge.

Nodelmann, P. (2008). The hidden adult: Defining children’s literature. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Pearce, M. (2008). Investigating the collocational behaviour of MAN and WOMAN in the BNC using Sketch Engine. Corpora 3(1), pp. 1-29 http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/E174950320800004X

Poynter, E. (2018) You girls stay here: Gender roles in popular British children's adventure fiction, 1930-70. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Poynter, E. (2020) Aggressive but loyal: modification and gender roles in British children's adventure fiction. Gender and Language 14 (2), pp. 175-196

Rayson, P. (2008). From Key Words to Key Semantic Domains. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13(4), pp. 519-49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.13.4.06ray

Rowe Townsend, J. (1990). Written for children. London: Bodley Head.

Ruano, P. (2018). An analysis of Charles Dickens's Gender-based Use of Speech Verbs. Gender & Language 12(2), pp. 192-217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/genl.31137

Rudd, D. (2000). Enid Blyton and the mystery of children's literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Rudd, D. (2009). In Defence of the Indefensible? Some Grounds for Enid Blyton's Appeal. In J. Maybin and N. J. Watson (Eds) Children's Literature: Approaches and Territories., (pp. 168-182). Milton Keynes: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sigley, R. and Holmes, J. (2002). Looking at girls in Corpora of English. Journal of English Linguistics 30(2), pp. 138-157

Skočajić, M. M., Radosavljević, J. G., Okičić, M. G., Janković, I. O., & Žeželj, I. L. (2020). Boys just don’t! Gender stereotyping and sanctioning of counter-stereotypical behavior in pre- schoolers. Sex Roles, 82 (3–4), pp. 163–172. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11199-019-01051-x

Sunderland, J. (2011). Language, gender and children’s fiction. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Tsao, Y-L. (2020) Gender issues in young children's literature. Reading Improvement 57 (1), pp.16-21

Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). The Representation of Social Actors, in C.R. Caldas-Coulthard and M. Coulthard (Eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis,( pp. 32–70). London: Routledge.

Zanfabro, G. (2017). Gender Matters: What Is at Stake in Dealing with Children’s Literature? TRANS Retrieved from http://transrevuews.org/1440

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/joll.v24i1.7497