Feminist critical discourse analysis and children’s fantasy fiction – modelling a new approach

In this paper, I want to consider the possibility of applying feminist critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine gender in children’s fantasy fiction. There are two major aspects in claiming that a critical linguistic, feminist approach to children’s fantasy might be needed. Firstly, considering the earlier applications of feminist CDA and CDA, one should note that these approaches have rarely been interested in children’s fantasy, or even children’s fiction, or fiction in general. On one hand, this is not surprising, since according to Stephens (2006), in applying a linguistic analysis to literature one can expect to receive serious criticism from literary critics who are sceptic about using linguistic tools in studies of fiction. On the other hand, it is very much of a surprise that an approach that is interested in relationships between language, ideology, society and gender (feminist CDA/ CDA), would not be interested in children’s literature, which is, in any case, an institutionally constrained form of socialisation. Recognising this view, there have been attempts to adapt CDA to children’s literature (Stephens 1992, 2006), CDA to young adult fiction (Talbot 1995), and even feminist CDA to children’s fiction (Sunderland 2004) – my purpose is to critically evaluate the possibilities of applying these approaches further in examining children’s fantasy.