1887
Volume 17, Issue 2
  • ISSN 0155-0640
  • E-ISSN: 1833-7139
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

This paper examines children’s literature as discourse and argues that attention to the textuality of children’s literature discloses a network of signifying strategies which serve to confine texts within a narrow band of socio-cultural values. The language of fiction written for children offers conventionalised discourses by means of which content is encoded. While there are many other books can be and are titled, these are culturally representative. They are symptomatic of the frames used in Australian children’s literature, and in effect disclose how that literature is complicit in the ideological construction of Australian childhood (or, in this case, adolescence). This is part of how children are socialized. Hence the mediators of children’s books focus attention on the ‘truth’-value of theme and content and perpetuate the illusion that discourse is merely transparent.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/aral.17.2.07ste
1994-01-01
2025-04-20
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Brown, Gillian and George Yule
    (1983) Discourse analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511805226
    https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805226 [Google Scholar]
  2. Gleeson, Libby
    (1993) Love me, love me not. Viking, Ringwood.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Hunt, Peter
    (1978) The cliché count: A practical aid for the selection of books for children. Children’s Literature in Education9,3:143–50. doi: 10.1007/BF01142925
    https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01142925 [Google Scholar]
  4. (1988) Degrees of control: Stylistics and the discourse of children’s literature. In Nikolas Coupland (ed.) Styles of discourse. Croom Helm, London.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. MacCabe, Colin
    (1985) Realism and the cinema: Notes on some Brechtian theses. InTracking the dignifier. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Toolan, Michael
    (ed.) (1992) Language, text and context. Routledge, London and New York.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Stephens, John
    (1992a) Language and ideology in children’s fiction. Longman, London and New York.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. (1992b) Reading the signs. Sense and significance in written texts. Kangaroo Press, Sydney.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Tyler, Stephen A.
    (1987), The unspeakable. Discourse, dialogue, and rhetoric in the postmodern world. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1075/aral.17.2.07ste
Loading
  • Article Type: Research Article
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error