{"title":"Stylistics and children’s literature","authors":"M. Burke, Karen Coats","doi":"10.1177/09639470211072153","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article constitutes an introduction to the five articles that appear in this special issue. This framing process starts by highlighting the sparse, yet important, work that has been conducted over the past 20 years on children’s literature in the field of stylistics. The focus in the article then turns to a more general discussion of the language of children’s literature. Here, in this chronological overview of language usage in books written for children, an outline is sketched from the writers and philosophers of the enlightenment up to contemporary debates on literacy, cognition and theory of mind. In the section that follows, the five studies that appear in this special issue are briefly synopsized. What becomes apparent is the wide range of methodological approaches that have been taken by the scholars in question to analyze the texts that are under investigation, in both quantitative and qualitative ways. The article ends with a plea for more stylistic work to be conducted in the areas of both children’s literature and young adult fiction. This is especially pertinent because stylisticians possess the key linguistic and analytic skills and tools to help, in interdisciplinary settings, to address current social, emotional and cognitive challenges pertaining to child development through literacy and through reading in particular.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"31 1","pages":"3 - 10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language and Literature","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211072153","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article constitutes an introduction to the five articles that appear in this special issue. This framing process starts by highlighting the sparse, yet important, work that has been conducted over the past 20 years on children’s literature in the field of stylistics. The focus in the article then turns to a more general discussion of the language of children’s literature. Here, in this chronological overview of language usage in books written for children, an outline is sketched from the writers and philosophers of the enlightenment up to contemporary debates on literacy, cognition and theory of mind. In the section that follows, the five studies that appear in this special issue are briefly synopsized. What becomes apparent is the wide range of methodological approaches that have been taken by the scholars in question to analyze the texts that are under investigation, in both quantitative and qualitative ways. The article ends with a plea for more stylistic work to be conducted in the areas of both children’s literature and young adult fiction. This is especially pertinent because stylisticians possess the key linguistic and analytic skills and tools to help, in interdisciplinary settings, to address current social, emotional and cognitive challenges pertaining to child development through literacy and through reading in particular.
期刊介绍:
Language and Literature is an invaluable international peer-reviewed journal that covers the latest research in stylistics, defined as the study of style in literary and non-literary language. We publish theoretical, empirical and experimental research that aims to make a contribution to our understanding of style and its effects on readers. Topics covered by the journal include (but are not limited to) the following: the stylistic analysis of literary and non-literary texts, cognitive approaches to text comprehension, corpus and computational stylistics, the stylistic investigation of multimodal texts, pedagogical stylistics, the reading process, software development for stylistics, and real-world applications for stylistic analysis. We welcome articles that investigate the relationship between stylistics and other areas of linguistics, such as text linguistics, sociolinguistics and translation studies. We also encourage interdisciplinary submissions that explore the connections between stylistics and such cognate subjects and disciplines as psychology, literary studies, narratology, computer science and neuroscience. Language and Literature is essential reading for academics, teachers and students working in stylistics and related areas of language and literary studies.