The Language of Fear in Children’s Literature: A Case Study of Ted Hughes’s Poems for Children

Abstract

The article tackles the issue of the language of fear exploited in children’s literature, taking Ted Hughes’s Nature poems for young readers as the object of analysis. It presents a perspective of linguistic stylistics and literary semantics and as such is not meant to be a critical literary evaluation of Hughes’s poetry. Rather, it focuses on linguistic instruments of creating the aura of fear in children’s poetry and their cognitive import. The author has chosen a neuroscientific paradigm for the two closely related emotions – fear and anxiety – as propagated by American researcher Joseph LeDoux, most prominently in his work “Anxious” (2015). LeDoux maintains that the feeling of fear is not inborn but rather a cognitive construct emergent from the use of one’s native language practiced within a particular socio-cultural context. The unique atmosphere of Hughes’s poetry has been achieved by a rich lexicon of fear-related notions and a skillfully applied figuration (anthropomorphisms, similes). His poetic imagery powerfully complements the vocabulary and troping in calling to life fictional worlds, often uncanny and menacing, remote from the young readers’ experience. The author of this article perceives in the lexicon, figuration and multimodal imagery (both verbal and visual, the latter realized as illustrations in picture-books) an important didactic device that teaches children how to manage fearsome experiences. This capability will also prepare children to face anxiety, an emotion typical of adult life and related mostly to existential problems.