A perennial topic of research on giftedness has been individuals’ perceptions of and attitudes
towards giftedness, the gifted, and gifted education. Although giftedness is a culturally
constructed concept, most examination of the term’s meanings and implications has used
reactive measures (i.e., surveys) to tap respondents’ giftedness-related perceptions and
attitudes within the context of formal education. To provide a better understanding of the cultural
meanings associated with giftedness—the term’s cultural framing—we investigated
the depiction of giftedness within a professional cultural product removed from education,
namely, a large corpus of US fictional texts. We examined patterns of word usage in the
vicinity of the term gift*, when used in the dictionary senses related to giftedness, in a large
corpus of US fictional texts of recent decades, consisting of 485,179 text samples and
1,002,889,754 word tokens. Via inductive methods of quantitative text analysis, we explored
themes occurring in the vicinity of gift*; and with an existing lookup dictionary, we assessed
deductively the overall emotional valance of the writing near gift*. Our investigation revealed
ways in which the literary exploration of giftedness coheres with and distinguishes itself from
the outlooks on giftedness noted for survey-based research in education settings. In fictional
texts, giftedness evinces special associations with humanities domains and beauty and, on
balance, correlates positively with emotionally positive words