What’s It All About?

Children’s literature has much to tell us about how gender is constructed via the linguistic choices made by authors, in the cultural context within which they write. It also has the potential to act as a major socialising agent, providing young readers with the building blocks of their developing identities. Fiction for children both reflects and perpetuates ideas about how to be a girl, or how to be a boy. In this chapter, I outline the major theoretical concepts underlying this study of best-selling children’s series in English and explain my interpretation of each, focussing on the role of language in supporting existing ideologies of gender and their impact on children. The aim of this book is to use a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach to draw out patterns in indirect sexism, in social gender, and this chapter forms the theoretical backdrop.