This book offers a comprehensive analysis of character focalization in ten contemporary realistic children's novels. The author argues that character focalization, defined as the location of fictional world perception in the mind of a character, is a prominent textual structure in these novels. He demonstrates how significant meanings are conveyed in a variety of forms related to characters' personal and interpersonal experiences. Through close analysis of each text, moreover, he exposes distinctive perceptual, psychological, and social-psychological patterns in the opening chapters of each novel, which are thereafter developed by the principles of continuation, augmentation, and reconfiguration. This book will appeal to scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of narrative studies, stylistics, children's literature scholarship, linguistics, and education.
"This ambitious study tracks and categorises the experiences of fictional child characters in ten examples of contemporary realism for children, with publication dates spanning fifty years ... . this study represents a welcome application of systemic functional linguistics to the study of children's literature and provides many interesting ideas and practical tools for future research." (Sarah Hardstaff, Barnboken, Vol. 41, 2018)