The Construction of Middle Eastern Culture in Children’sLiterature: A Cognitive Corpus Stylistic Study of Selected Stories
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31185/bsj.Vol19.Iss30.1232Keywords:
Middle Eastern culture, children’s literature, cognitive stylistics, corpus stylistics.Abstract
Literature can reflect the culture of a society and this engages readers
around the world. In light of this, the study aims to identify the language
patterns that reflect Middle Eastern culture in children’s short stories. It also
seeks to investigate the stylistic features in the selected stories by applying
cognitive corpus stylistic tools to reveal cultural cues of the Middle East.
Two stories from children’s literature are selected as data to be analyzed:
“Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” and “Sindbad the Sailor”. These stories
are taken from a book titled Sindbad the Sailor and Other Stories from The
Arabian Nights (2014) by Edmund Dulac. The frameworks developed by
Cermakova and Mahlberg (2024) and Stockwell (2020) served as the
foundation for this study's model. The quantitative analysis benefits
significantly from the insights that corpus stylistics may offer. The
#LancsBox 6.0 software aids in locating textual proof to back up the manual
analysis. Therefore, combining top-down (qualitative analysis) and bottomup (quantitative analysis using corpus tools) approaches results in a
comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the selected data. This study is of
value in examining the construction of Middle Eastern culture in children’s
literature. The main findings of the study reveal crucial stylistic language
patterns that construct Middle Eastern culture in the selected children’s short
stories.
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