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The fictional child characters in Stevenson´s Treasure Island, Dickens´ Oliver Twist and Twain´s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer have been analysed through a framework evolved from Bronfenbrenner´s theory of human development, aspects of developmental psychology and discourse and pragmatic features that the characters use in dialogues. Focus has been on textual and extra-textual details and the Macrosystems of the novels. The correlation between the cognitive, psychosocial and pragmatic skills of the child protagonists has also been discussed. In addition, the literary techniques the novelists use to highlight behavioral traits of the child characters, or for stylistic effects, have been considered wherever such features appear. This book is intended for anyone who is interested in interdisciplinary research. According to this study, literature, like psychology, can be used to make an objective study of human behavior. By examining the cognitive and psychosocial aspects that the child characters display, the researcher could demonstrate that the child protagonists in the selected novels are different from average ability children.

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Olga Yazbec studied English language and literature in Addis Ababa University. She did her undergraduate and post-graduate studies in the same university. Her area of specialization is literature. She is Assistant Professor and teaches prose fiction, literary criticism and pragmatics in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature.

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