Discovering What It Means to Be Unladylike in Children’s Fiction

Fiction plays an important role in the socialization of children and, in particular, learning about gender. In fictional worlds, as in the real world, social norms and values are encoded in language. These norms are observable in repeated linguistic patterns. To identify such patterns, we can draw on corpus linguistic methods. In this chapter, we present a case study of the use of the adjective unladylike across different discourses, before we focus on its use in the detective genre as exemplified in the best-selling Murder Most Unladylike series by Robin Stevens. Awareness of norm-creating linguistic patterns is crucial in order to challenge them, so the methods presented in this chapter contribute to the toolkit that can be used in the teaching of critical reading.