Constructions of childhood in the works of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce: Pilgrims and Peter Pans

My analysis is based on Fairclough's concepts of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, which regard text and discourse as active forces in the social construction of knowledge. Halliday's systemic -functional linguistics, as a functional and semantically -based grammar, also

facilitates analysis of how texts construct social relations. To demonstrate how the language of the text constructs the social relations determined by the Pilgrim and Peter Pan models of childhood, I have used a transitivity analysis to investigate how the selection of material or mental processes, and of certain types of participant, determine and construct characterization. I have also used a mood analysis to reveal some of the power structures operating and coming into conflict with each other as different discourses are activated in the text. Other aspects of narrative such as focalization round out the analysis of how these

models function, showing how the novels of these two authors thus participate in and reaccentuate widely circulating discourses of childhood, which effectively construct versions of childhood which disempower children and circumscribe the identities and narratives available to them.