Genres

Abstract

Genres Claudia Nelson Picking up from our most recent special issue and its focus on genre in African American children’s literature, the articles included in this general issue focus on a range of genres, and especially on what happens when genres collide. How may the characteristics of one set of texts inflect the content, outlook, characterization, or theme of a work affiliated with another set? Together, the articles in ChLAQ 42.1 help illustrate the dynamism of children’s and young adult literature as a body of work that uses the preoccupations made familiar through one genre to complicate others. We begin with a little-studied group of American texts, examined in Allison Speicher’s “The School of One Scholar: Schoolmistress-Schoolboy Romance in the Nineteenth-Century School Story.” Writing against a nineteenth-century convention that saw the potential affection between female teacher and male pupil as analogous to the bond between mother and son, the authors whom Speicher discusses see the relationship rather as fundamentally erotic. This marriage of school story to romance results in a collection of fictions that, Speicher observes, “consistently, if not always confidently, challenge age and gender norms,” effectively queering not only the school story and the romance, but also conventional Victorian assumptions about the “natural” limitations to the power of the schoolmistress. Like Speicher’s contribution, the second article in this issue, Dawn Heinecken’s “Contact Zones: Humans, Horses, and the Stories of Marguerite Henry,” looks at affectional bonds, in this case primarily those between humans and horses. Examining the 1949 Newbery medalist (Henry won this honor with King of the Wind) and many of her dozens of novels for children, Heinecken contends that Henry’s works should be understood in the context of current research into the posthuman, a field that embraces not only animal stories but also tales about figures such as mutants and cyborgs. For Heinecken, Henry’s interest in depicting animals and humans as interdependent agents—whose differing perspectives lead both to mutual fulfillment and to exploitation and pain—anticipates the way in which some much more recent science fiction deals with the ethics of interspecies relationships. [End Page 1] Michelle Ann Abate’s contribution to this issue, “‘Soda attracted girls like honey draws flies’: The Outsiders, the Boy Band Formula, and Adolescent Sexuality,” considers S. E. Hinton’s groundbreaking 1967 young adult novel in light of the conventions of the boy band, which Abate sees as an indispensable part of the teen culture of Hinton’s era. Tracing the similarities between Hinton’s characterization of the greasers and popular media portrayals of the members of groups such as The Beatles (in their early days) and The Monkees, Abate complicates the genre of The Outsiders by presenting it less as gritty social realism than as a response to a particular kind of music and its attendant journalism. In particular, she draws attention to how Hinton’s greasers reflect the power of both marketing techniques and adolescent sexual longings. In “Adaptations of Play Songs in Ghanaian Children’s and (Young) Adult Drama,” Helen Yitah likewise considers the confluence of music and literature in the decade of the 1960s, although her investigation is far from Abate’s both geographically and generically. The three Ghanaian dramas that Yitah discusses were produced within five years of one another, between 1965 and 1970, but targeted different age groups. All three, however, incorporate children’s play songs. As Yitah details, the use of this folk element enables each playwright to highlight tropes having to do with masculine vulnerability. By mixing genres, they draw upon “the repositories of their culture’s experience to communicate both the contemporary experience and the historical process out of which it grew,” employing traditional childhood songs to express concerns about adult manhood. Finally, in “The Monstrous-Feminine and Hegemonic Masculinity in Rick Yancey’s The Monstrumologist,” Sean P. Connors analyzes Yancey’s 2009 gothic horror tale for adolescents as a coming-of-age narrative that employs overt misogyny as a way of navigating a contemporary crisis in masculinity. If the works for the 1960s Ghanaian stage that Yitah examines use performances of children’s play songs as the focal points for...