CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Children's Literature

Children's Literature

Introduction

Seen in this light, the language of children's literary and non-literary texts is a very powerful socialising instrument, as Halliday (2008) emphasizes: through language a child learns about customs, hierarchies and attitudes; therefore the language of literature can promote and reinforce the adoption of these customs, etc. Stephens (1992) maintains that every book has an implicit ideology, usually in the form of beliefs and values taken for granted in society (Birketveit, 2005). This taken-for-granted ness makes it difficult to reveal the underlying assumptions, because the analyst often entertains similar assumptions and values of which he is unaware. This paper discusses in what ways children's literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was shaped by changing ideologies.

Discussion

Despite its importance as an ideological instrument, children's literature has mostly been neglected in critical linguistic research. Stephens (1992) analyses narrative techniques and intertextuality from the ideological point of view, but does not take a linguistic approach to ideology. Knowles and Malmkjær (2006), on the other hand, carry out a linguistic analysis of ideology in children's books. The translation of children's literature has attracted even less scholarly attention (Knowles, 2006). In Finland, translations account for 65-70% of the literature published annually for children; about half of all translations are from English. Almost every Finnish child is exposed to translate literature. These translations are bound to have a significant effect on the way children experience literature, and the language of translated texts may have some bearing on their language development and acceptance of ideas (Laviosa, 2006).

Ideology can appear in children's fiction in the form of explicit statements of ethical or moral principles, but as children's literature becomes less conspicuously didactic in the Western countries, ideology is most often now realised as implicit assumptions and values underlying the writer's linguistic choices. Knowles and Malmkjær (2006), following Thompson (2000), describe five modes of operation of ideology — legitimating, dissimulation, unification, fragmentation, and reification — and identify a number of micro-linguistic (involving single words and phrases) and macro linguistic strategies (involving a clause or more) which can be used to realise them (Puurtinen, 2008). In the following, I will concentrate on reification and three associated strategies, passivisation, nominalisation, and personified participial attribute constructions (the last is my addition to Knowles and Malmkjær's list) because of their connection to readability issues discussed above (Rosa, 2004). These forms should be relatively easily retrievable by computer. It must be emphasized that none of the linguistic forms discussed here are always indicators of ideology in a text, therefore the linguistic analysis of texts must be supported by a good knowledge of the values held by the surrounding culture.

In addition to the fact that some linguistic forms which carry ideological meaning may reduce readability in a children's book, ideology and readability are related at the extra textual, socio-cultural level. Whether high readability of children's literature is considered to be of primary importance or not in society is an ideological question in itself (Thompson, ...