Character Development: Visibility and Roles

Traditional representations of binary gender are often found in early linguistic studies of children’s fiction, typically surveys of prize-winning books over several decades. These studies tend to focus on the frequency and relative prominence of female and male characters, as well as the occupations attributed to them. In this chapter I use corpus linguistic methods to investigate these same aspects, which arguably form the foundation of gender representation in children’s literature. Despite this corpus of best-selling children’s fiction series extending up to 2011, there has been little change in terms of the balance in gendered reference to characters or the distribution of their roles between the older and the more recent series. Male characters dominate numerically, as well as having the greatest range of occupations, especially those with higher status, while female roles also tend to follow traditional lines with domestic roles dominating.