Children’s Literature and Childhood Discourses - Exploring Identity through Fiction

Children’s fiction reflects social values and stereotypes, and it shapes what children learn about the world. Providing an interdisciplinary perspective on children’s fiction and childhood, this book offers a fresh insight into the key issues in fiction for children, such as gender, social stereotypes, embodied and spatial experience, and emotions. Connecting classic children’s texts such as Alice in Wonderland with contemporary fiction including Harry Potter, the book innovatively brings together perspectives from corpus linguistics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, literary and cultural studies, and human geography. Chapter authors also include a novelist and a creative practitioner. Divided into two parts – Experiencing Texts, and Fiction and the Real World – the book highlights the important link between fictional stories and real life, and explores a range of approaches to experiencing texts, including a cross-linguistic view through translation and corpus linguistic methods for the study of literary texts. The materiality of texts is also investigated, including the spaces they take up in libraries, their cultural history moulded through performances, and the different reading environments that shape childhood, such as fashion and urban spaces. Connecting academic research with texts of cultural currency, the book casts light on the role of literature in how children construct the world around them.