This article reads contemporary Chinese children's author Yin Jianling's novels "The Paper Puppy" ("Zhiren") and "Orange Fish" ("Juzi Yu") alongside her letter collection "Fifteen Letters to Girls" ("Zhi Weilai de Ni") to explore the overarching themes of femininity, difference and female…

Though critics have debated the gendered ideologies at work in the ballet book genre, discussion so far has overlooked how race shapes the meanings of such stories and the ways that stereotypes about black females have caused them to be excluded from representation in both the world of classical dance and ballet stories. This essay provides a…

School stories in contemporary China, which target a pre- and early-adolescent readership, frequently evoke representations of girlhood and boyhood in normative gender terms. The present article considers issues of femininity and gender in "Tomboy Dai An" ("Jia Xiaozi Dai An"), one among a series of commercially successful…

Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and Nathan Hale's graphic novel set "Rapunzel's Revenge" (2008) and "Calamity Jack" (2010) features fractured fairy tales that take up the issue of 'the damsel in distress,' questioning and complicating traditional gender roles in fairy tales. Throughout both graphic novels Rapunzel's character…

Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series (2005-2008) and Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games" series (2008-2010) have been hugely successful and influential texts, both as best-selling literary works and as action movie franchises. (To avoid confusion, "Twilight" and "The Hunger Games" in this essay refer to the…

As Amanda Diekman and Sarah Murnen (2004) note, studies of "nonsexist" children's books tend to focus on girls performing stereotypically masculine behaviors without consideration of how boy characters perform gender (p. 381); however, this narrow focus on girl figures in the identification of nonsexist works has two side-effects:…

This article explores the constructions of class in British girls' school stories. Feminist scholarship has, to some extent, reclaimed the school story, pointing to the widening of acceptable gender roles for female characters in girls' school stories, compared to their counterparts in mixed-gender stories, and indeed real life. While the…

Combining feminist and narratological perspectives, this paper examines the construction of subjectivity in two young adult novels with a range of narratorial positions. The investigation is grounded in Robyn McCallum's work on intersubjectivity, in which interrelationships affecting subjectivity are only possible when the narrative permits a…

A number of previous studies have addressed gender role-stereotyping in Caldecott Award-winning picturebooks. Building upon the extensive scholarship examining representations of females in Caldecott books, this current study offers a critical investigation of how gender is represented in Caldecott Medal-winning literature from 1938 to 2011 by…

In this paper, we focus on gendered themes promulgated in three books written in diary cartoon form. Although written for different audiences, each of these books constructs gender norms in similar ways. They promote heteronormative gender roles for boys and girls by endorsing traditional femininities and hegemonic masculinities through the…

Notes that an unusually large number of Chinese nursery rhymes provide realistic depictions of women's life experiences over the long history of China. Describes how they tell about women's fears and concerns as well as hopes and dreams and even sufferings. Divides those rhymes into three categories that represent three stages of a woman's life.…