In:Corpora and Rhetorically Informed Text Analysis: The diverse applications of DocuScope
Edited by David West Brown and Danielle Zawodny Wetzel
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 109] 2023
► pp. 264–285
Books for the Young by Caroline Hewins
A DocuScope analysis of gendered readership in an early children’s literature corpus
Published online: 29 June 2023
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.109.12fit
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.109.12fit
Abstract
Children’s literature was formally distinguished
as a distinct category of literature during the Progressive Era in
the United States, largely through the work of professional “book
women” like children’s librarians, publishers, and teachers. This
chapter examines one of the first attempts to formalize a selection
of existing literature into a canon of children’s books, the 1882
pamphlet Books for the Young by Caroline M. Hewins.
While this booklist is widely acknowledged by children’s literature
scholars to be a major milestone in the formation of the field, the
actual texts that comprise the list are understudied. In this
chapter, we analyze the corpus of books named in this list by
applying rhetorical tagging and focusing on the subset of books
designated by Hewins for specific gendered readership (i.e. books
especially for boys and especially for girls). We argue that Hewins
assigns a narrower scope of text types to the category of books
girls will like, which sets a precedent for future gendering of
readership for the field of children’s literature well into the 20th
century.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The Progressive Era: Making space for children’s literature
- 3.Caroline Hewins: Building a canon of children’s literature
- 4.Books for the Young: Analyzing a corpus of early children’s literature
- 4.1Data
- 4.2Methods
- 4.3Plots and results – PCA
- 4.4Plots and results – AHC
- 5.Discussion: Gendered readership in early children’s literature
- 6.Conclusion
Notes References Appendix
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