From portrait analysis to template poetics: on stereotypes and gender models in representation of children in Soviet children's prose

Abstract

This paper presents a methodological discussion of the analysis of stereotypical traits in the depiction of the characters in literary fiction using Soviet children’s literature as a sample. The discussion is supported by a pilot study of gender stereotyping that adds to the existing literature an extensive discussion of the gendered portrayal of children. We propose to treat stereotypical features in characters not as a simple reflection of social norms, but as an element of literary diction. We label “template poetics” the analysis of these phenomena in fiction. The current study is based on the corpus of Soviet realistic prose for children and youth of the 1930s — 1980s. Basing on a random sample of character body parts mentions in the corpus (N=2486), we were able to trace the quantitative differences in the rates of mentions of various body parts due to the character’s gender and to discover a few characterization patterns that include a reference to the character’s body parts.

Keywords: literary corpora, Soviet children’s literature, gender, portrait, character, body