Method: The Plot Outlined

In this book I explore how gender is represented in the best-selling series in children’s literature in English. To do this, I use corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, a combination now often referred to as CADS or Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies. The method and the methodological decisions I made in conducting the research are detailed in this chapter, from its origins as a PhD project to the tools I used in these chapters. Along the way, I tried to find the best way to answer the ideological questions I had using the tools of corpus linguistics, and based on my linguistic knowledge of where in the sentence particular meanings would reside. This involved for each aspect a transition from quantitative facts and figures to qualitative semantic groupings and discourses. At each point I had to make decisions about questions of scope and settings that would ensure my findings were reliable and accurate. The chapter includes a discussion of the methods used across the entire book, as well as any special features of particular chapters, in terms of how the method evolved and how I adapted my general approach to suit the topic, whether it was descriptions of speech or representations of agency.