In this thesis, an attempt has been made to examine the representation of fictional childrncharacters in Stevenson's Treasure Island, Dickens's Oliver Twist and Twain's The Adventuresrnof Tom Sawyer based on a psychological framework of analysis evolved fromrnBronfenbrenner's theory of human development and selected aspects of developmentalrnpsychology. Both psychology and literature study human behavior although psychologyrnobserves human behavior directly from real life, whereas fiction deals with a reflection ofrnreality. Focus has been on textual and extra-textual details since the literary texts arernconsidered as psychological and sociological documents and are examined in relation to theirrnrespective Macrosystems.rnAttention has also been paid to the discourse and pragmatic features that the characters use inrndialogues. Therefore, the correlation between the cognitive, psychosocial and pragmatic ski llsrnthat the child protagonists display has also been considered. In addition, the literary techniquesrnthat the novelists use to highlight behavioral traits of the child protagonists, or to create literaryrneffects, have been touched upon wherever such features appear in the novels.rnThe findings of this study have been discussed in chapter seven in relation to other critics'rnopinions on the child protagonists that have been analyzed in this study. By applying arnpsychological framework of analysis, the present researcher tried to probe into the cognitivernand psychosocial aspects of the child characters' behavior. She feels that applying parametersrnselected from developmental psychology to literature helped her to make an objective analysisrnof characterization. Some reviewers, for instance, stated that Oliver Twist, in Dickens 's OliverrnTwist, and Tom Sawyer, in Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, are different from otherrnchildren belonging to their age group, but they did not provide a theoretical explanation forrnsuch behavior. Therefore, thi s study has contributed something new by identifying therncognitive and psychosocial aspects of late childhood, early adolescence and gifted children thatrnthe child protagonists of the selected texts display in their behavior.rnBesides, although the child protagonists analyzed in thi s study lived in different Macrosystems,rnthey share similarities, which can be attributed to the fact that they represent universal children.On the other hand, they also possess individual behavioral traits which distinguish them fromrnone another.rnTo sum up, this research is only a modest attempt at showing that it is possible to analyzernfictional characters based on an eclectic approach derived from developmental psychology,rnliterary criticism, discourse analysis and pragmatics because the nature of literature is such thatrnit can respond to different approaches to literary analysis and interpretation ..