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

Informazioni relative al progetto

GLARE

ID dell’accordo di sovvenzione: 749521

DOI

10.3030/749521

Progetto chiuso

Data della firma CE 28 Marzo 2017

Data di avvio 1 Settembre 2017

Data di completamento 31 Agosto 2019

Finanziato da

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Costo totale

€ 195 454,80

Contributo UE

€ 195 454,80

Coordinato da

THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GLARE (Exploring Gender in Children's Literature from Cognitive Corpus Stylistic Perspective)

Periodo di rendicontazione: 2017-09-01 al 2019-08-31

Sintesi del contesto e degli obiettivi generali del progetto

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.

Lavoro eseguito dall’inizio del progetto fino alla fine del periodo coperto dalla relazione e principali risultati finora ottenuti

Glare employed both quantitative and qualitative methods, and compared textual patterns along two main dimensions: in children’s literature over time and between fiction and non-fiction texts. Our primary data sources were two corpora of children’s literature: the 19th century corpus of children’s literature (ChiLit), which was specifically compiled for GLARE and is now publicly available and searchable through the CLiC web application (clic.bham.ac.uk) and a corpus of contemporary children’s fiction, which we were able to access through working with our partner institution, Oxford University Press. The non-fictional texts were sourced from the Times Digital Archive. In our analysis, we treated gender as a binary, because of our starting point in the 19th century. Our results focus on two main areas: Firstly, by identifying, quantifying and categorising character “types”, e.g. mother or king, we were able to provide an overview of the gendered fictional society that is shared across a large set of books. Secondly, by focusing on patterns of body language presentation we were able to trace changes in way in which body language reflected gendered behaviour.

The GLARE findings were communicated through a range of channels

1. The project webpage (https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/glare) with its blog and Twitter account.
2. The interdisciplinary GLARE symposium held in April 2019 at the University of Birmingham
3. Presentations at 10 international conferences
4. At least 3 publications are currently in preparation, one of them an edited collection based on the GLARE symposium.

Progressi oltre lo stato dell’arte e potenziale impatto previsto (incluso l’impatto socioeconomico e le implicazioni sociali più ampie del progetto fino ad ora)

The GLARE project was set within a cognitive corpus stylistics theoretical framework; but due to its societal relevance the study of gender in children’s literature requires a truly interdisciplinary approach. Through the project symposium, GLARE successfully facilitated a dialogue between cutting-edge research from linguistics and stylistics, to children’s literature, and global ethics. Beyond academia, the objectives and findings of the GLARE project connect with issues in the current public discourse. This relevance has become visible, for instance, through our collaboration with the high-profile children’s book author Robin Stevens, who contributed to the GLARE blog and supported out “How to write a female villain” story writing competition. Other contributions to the blog include a guest post from the social enterprise “Lifting Limits”. We also addressed wider audiences through a talk at the Hay Festival 2019 (https://www.hayfestival.com/p-15454-michaela-mahlberg-and-anna-cermakova.aspx) a collaboration with the Bournville Bookfest and three articles for the Conversation. The wider impact of GLARE is also visible through its contribution to the National Literacy Trust Hub ‘Birmingham Stories’, which will continue the story writing competition launched originally by GLARE.

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