Shuffling Softly, Sighing Deeply: A Digital Inquiry into Representations of Older Men and Women in Literature for Different Ages

When gender is brought into concerns about older people, the emphasis often lies on stereotypes connected to women, and few comparative studies have been conducted pertaining representation of intersection between age in fiction. This article argues that not only children’s literature, traditionally considered be a carrier ideology, plays large part target readership’s socialization, but so do young adult In corpus 41 Dutch books written for different ages, men women studied through verbs, grammatical possessions adjectives associated with relevant fictional characters, which were extracted from texts computational method dependency parsing. Older characters featured most frequently fiction adults, where, more than younger readers, they are depicted as being prone illness, experiencing effects deteriorating body having limited social network. children, little no association adulthood mortality was found data. Ageist both genders throughout corpus. terms characterization, male adults physicality, including matters illness mobility, while character traits emotions show up varied manner connection female characters.