Gender in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Even though women around the world are becoming more and more independent and some people nowadays go as far as to negate the persistence of gender inequalities, we are still faced with unequal representations of women and men on a daily basis. This book examines representations of gender in children's literature. It provides information on children's gender development and the role children's books may play in it, as well as an overview of past research on gender representations in children's literature. This theoretical information then serves as background to a Critical Discourse Analysis, which investigates representations of gender in the popular young adult trilogy The Hunger Games. Since the Hunger Games books have been praised as feminist, it is the aim of this book to find out whether this is really the case. The present study is based on Fairclough's (1992) three dimensional model of discourse and offers quantitative analyses conducted with the help of a concordance software, which are complemented by qualitative analyses of specific results. The analyses focus on adjectival descriptors of females and males, passive/active roles and stereotypical behaviors, with the latter two parts based on Halliday's (1985) functional grammar and the concept of transitivity. The final part of the study offers a critical discussion of the highly traditional ending of the trilogy.