Gendered worlds in contemporary Young Adult fiction

Gendered worlds in contemporary Young Adult fiction Young Adult fiction (YAF), aimed at 11-18 year olds, has a significant role to play in the socialisation of young readers, representing the world and its people, and creating expectations and explanations of their place within it. To date, most YAF research has focused on the themes and styles of individual books, authors or book series with little attention paid to the sex of authors across genres (exceptions are Cermakova and Farová, 2017; Hunt, 2025). In this paper we consider whether female and male authors construct differing worlds with different emphases and preoccupations. The dataset for this study is a newly-compiled, 5-million-word corpus of the 50 most commercially-successful YAF in the UK over a 5-year period (2017-2022, Exploring Discourses of Representation in young Adult fiction [DoRA], Leedham et. al., 2024). The corpus was divided into DoRA_F (34 books) and DoRA_M (16 books) and explored through keyword analysis with AntConc (Anthony, 2024) to highlight the different ways in which authors construct their fictional worlds. Initial findings were investigated with students and librarians in one secondary school (n=18), providing insightful responses which enriched our subsequent investigations. The study revealed that female and male authors construct starkly distinct worlds with female authors focusing on characters’ embodied emotions (e.g. my smile fades), whereas male authors focus on characters’ interactions with the natural world (e.g. he crawled through the hole). This contrast between a focus on internal and external worlds appears to be a distinctive area of difference between female and male authors of YAF, and cuts across genres and subject matter. We argue that gendered worlds are a fundamental, yet often overlooked, aspect of YAF which have a significant impact in the building of young people’s worldviews. References Anthony, L. (2024). AntConc (Version 4.3.1) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/AntConc Cermakova, Anna and Farová, Lenka (2017) His eyes narrowed — her eyes downcast: contrastive corpus-stylistic analysis of female and male writing. Linguistica Pragensia 27(2):7 Hunt, Sally (2025) Linguistic representations of Gender in Children's Literature: Feeling, Speaking, Doing Palgrave Macmillan. Leedham, M., Hunt S., and Mukherjee, S.J. (2024) Uncovering Discourses of Representation in Young Adult Fiction (DoRA). The Open University.