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H2020Individual fellowship2017–2019

GLARE · Exploring Gender in Children's Literature from Cognitive Corpus Stylistic Perspective

Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2017-09-01 → 2019-08-31
EU contribution
€195,455
Participants
1
Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST

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Results in brief

Exploring Gender in Children's Literature from Cognitive Corpus Stylistic Perspective

Gender equality remains a critical societal challenge. But how do we ‘learn’ gender? Children’s literature presents one source of cultural norms, values and assumptions. It constitutes an important formative discourse. So children learn about gendered concepts and behaviours through the language use they experience in these (and other) texts. To understand this formative influence more deeply, the GLARE project examined the discursive construction of gender in corpora of English children’s literature – covering the period from the 19th century, which is the time when the first children’s classics, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, emerged, right up to contemporary fiction for children. GLARE explored gender on the basis of repeated language patterns studied with the help of corpus linguistic methods. Our overall aim has been to identify gendered patterns in the construction of fictional characters, to describe such patterns over time and relate them to patterns in non-fiction. To contextualise the analysis these gendered patterned, we have drawn on the concept of mind-modelling. This cognitive poetic concept has allowed us to interpret gendered representations of people in fiction with regard to societal patterns of the real world.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Gender equality remains a critical societal challenge. But how does one ‘learn’ gender? Children’s literature presents one early source of cultural norms, values and assumptions about gender. Language use in these texts is a crucial means by which children learn about gendered concepts and behaviours. To understand this formative influence more deeply, the innovative GLARE project will examine the discursive construction of gender in corpora of English children’s literature drawing on a novel cognitive corpus stylistic approach to characterization to conceptualise the notion of gender. GLARE will further take a diachronic perspective to the development of gender representation over time. The ‘cognitive corpus stylistics’ links together corpus linguistics (CL) and Cognitive Poetics (CP). CL methods combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to text analysis while CP offers a theoretical framework to account for the creation of meaning in the mind of the reader. The approach adopted by GLARE stresses that the representation of real and fictional people is related – in terms of the background knowledge that readers bring to texts and in terms of the patterns used in a text. Hence, relationships between the representation of fictional characters and real people are to some extent a reflection of links between patterns in fictional and non-fictional texts. To investigate this relationship, the project draws on complementary data from the Times Digital Archive. Through the description and analysis of linguistic patterns GLARE will provide novel insights into the way in which children’s literature can influence the creation of gendered concepts and behaviours. GLARE will be situated at the University of Birmingham and supervised by Prof. Michaela Mahlberg, a world-leading expert in corpus stylistics. A secondment at Oxford University Press will allow the unique opportunity to access the largest electronic collection of children’s books, the Oxford Children’s Corpus.

Original text from CORDIS.

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Data: CORDIS, © European Union