| It is the intention of this thesis to complete a stylistic analysis of Newbery Award winning books from the past twenty years, comparing books targeted more towards male readers with more female-friendly books. This study examines excerpts from four texts for each gendered category. For the purpose of this study, boy books are defined as books with male authors and that are written around a male protagonist. For girl books the study selected books written by women and that introduce the readers to a female protagonist. This study also examines four books considered gender-transcendent in that they are popular with both male and female readers. These books come directly from the New York Times Bestseller List for Young Adult (YA) Literature.;For the purpose of this thesis, an analysis of stylistic devices, sentence structures, and word forms, the methods were designed to break down the language rather than building it up. The methodology of this study begins with the qualification and selection of books and works its way down into the vitals of the words, with the intentions of exposing variations in the language used in boy books and girl books and offering some interpretation and a better understanding of the reasons for those differences.;Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, written by Edward P. J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, provided the blueprint to guide the actual analysis. More specifically, the worksheets from the chapter "Style" provided the primary tools for doing the textual analysis on the style for each book. It was from this chapter that the real analytic techniques were derived. For each section, an individual study was conducted, and these individual studies comprised the overall study of Analytical Style. These studies were simple in that they only involved the counting of words, sentences, paragraphs, certain types of phrases, grammatical moves, and other stylistic devices.;In summary, it should be concluded here, through previous comments and through the resulting data, that the passages from the eight Newbery Award winners and the four New York Times Young Adult bestsellers demonstrate very little stylistic difference, at least in terms of this stylistic study. |
