Literature as a carrier of ideology: children's literature and control

The term ideology was coined by Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) to refer to ‘the radically empirical analysis of the human mind’ (Aiken, 1956:16). The emphasis on the mind remains in the twentieth-century tendency to link ideology with belief systems, political persuasions and the like, even though, in the twentieth century, analyses tend to be primarily socially orientated, and to take a distinctly linguistic turn.