Examining the Place of Female Characters’ Social and Cultural Lives in Children’s Novels

Abstract

. It is known that literary children's books have an important place in the process of developing positive attitudes towards reading. In line with this importance, the necessity of developing the characters in the books in accordance with the child's reality is emphasized. At the same time, it is important that the gender roles loaded on the characters are structured according to the characteristics of the child, and that the female characters are not separated in the frame of traditional understanding. In this study, it is aimed to investigate the effects of female characters in 42 children's domestic and translation books, which were determined by stratified sampling method in 1980-1990, 1991-2001, 2002-2012 periods. This examination was made by a detailed content analysis about the characters’ social and cultural lives. The results of the study revealed that the female characters have changed in terms of both socially and culturally in the 42- year period.