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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

| Carnegie Mellon University
| Carnegie Mellon University

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.

Keywords: children’s literature, librarians, canon formation, gender, children’s books, text mining, digital humanities
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
Published online: 29 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.109.12fit
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