Polarised Worlds: Female and Male Inner States in Children's Reading Anthologies

Abstract

Experts on literature and pedagogy from a wide range of countries and traditions currently argue for including literary texts with diverse characters in the curriculum, in order to provide children with varied reading experiences and foster their outgroup empathy skills. In this article, our aim is twofold. Firstly, we contribute to the debate in question by examining how the inner states (emotions and cognition) of female and male characters are portrayed in a purposeful sample of 44 prose excerpts from Czech Year 3 reading anthologies. Secondly, we present an innovative procedure for analysing texts that allows for the exploration of a selection of literary texts as individual entities and at the same time their analysis as an aggregate whole. Our analyses show that female characters' inner states tend to be underrepresented, especially regarding cognition. While we have not found significant differences in the overall quality of female characters' inner states in comparison to their male counterparts, individual excerpts tend to strongly highlight the inner states of female or male characters, respectively, thus creating story worlds with a distinct female-vs-male orientation.