The incorporation of popular culture into Newfoundland school children's narratives

The concept of children taking characters and ideas from popular culture and the mass media and incorporating them into new narratives is not new. On the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland I collected a corpus of narratives from two groups of children aged between seven and nine. It is commonly assumed that Newfoundland was isolated from mainland influences, but research has found it has a strong relationship to mainland popular culture and mass media. -- Despite Newfoundland's rich history of oral tradition, four categories emerged from the data showing evidence of influence from the mass media and popular culture. A gender division emerged in the data, with girls producing passive texts and boys creating action-adventure stories. I found my informants were all exposed to similar mass media and popular culture texts from which they took and incorporated characters and images into their own narratives