Adult Fiction Research Articles

Scattered Showers by Rainbow Rowell

Reviewed by: Scattered Showers by Rainbow Rowell Amanda Toledo Rowell, Rainbow Scattered Showers. Wednesday, 2022 [288p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250855411 $24.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781250855428 $12.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12 Master of romance Rainbow Rowell shows her prowess yet again with this delightful short story collection featuring characters new and returning. “Midnights” is a young adult homage to When Harry Met Sally, about two best friends reaching for each other over a series of New Year’s Eve parties throughout their high school years. “Kindred Spirits” is a witty, pop-culture tale of burgeoning new love discovered in the line to see the new Star Wars film circa 2015. Each story is crafted with humor and care, and the joyful early stories transition smoothly into more somber fare. “Winter Songs for Summer” is a mature but wickedly funny exploration of a first break up and moving on. “If the Fates Allow” revisits Reagan from Rowell’s Fangirl during the 2020 pandemic; “The Prince and the Troll” is a somber story about a world falling apart, ultimately focused on the sweet, human connection in the midst of chaos. Simon and Baz of Carry On are featured in “Snow for Christmas,” a perfect, poignant epilogue to the trilogy. This anthology neatly straddles the line between Rowell’s young adult and adult fiction, and it’s a must-read for fans of the author, while also offering a treasure trove for romance fans in general. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Literary Seoul

Literary Seoul Anton Hur (bio) and Krys Lee (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution We asked writers and translators two questions: What is the book, available in English, that best evokes Seoul? What is a favorite Seoul bookstore? Here are their answers. A Shimmering Summer Haze by Anton Hur I'M SOMETIMES ASKED if I ever encounter harassment in Seoul for holding my husband's hand in public. "It's Seoul," I explain, "no one cares about anyone." Violets (2022), by Kyung-Sook Shin, describes exactly that kind of Seoul where no one cares about anyone, and when they do, it's either miraculous or fatal. The "action"—for lack of a better word in this mostly atmospheric novel—takes place in a Seoul that's made of concrete and bathed in hot summer light, where pedestrians walk in crowds but at the same time are completely isolated from one another, whether they're on the streets of Jongno, the little parks in Gangbuk, or the grandness of Gwanghwamun Plaza where the protagonist, San, works at a flower shop, communing with the only living things that respond to her care: the plants and flowers she sells. To me, Seoul in the summer is a haze of white-gray concrete, lush greens, and the dazzling, eye-piercing shimmer of the Han River. Never has a novel captured the city as accurately as Violets, evoking in its very title the beauty and fragility of the lives lived in that city, and the violence that lies beneath. A City of Readers by Krys Lee I HEAR YOUR VOICE (2017), by Young-ha Kim, captures the landscape of a Seoul little known even to Koreans. In the novel, motorcycle groups of runaway and homeless teenagers roam the city on their bikes, which is their only claim to Seoul. It's a dark portrait of the city's unheard, disenfranchised, and most vulnerable of populations (see WLT, Nov. 2017, 83). My favorite bookstore in Seoul is Onul Books (책방오늘), a surprising gem in the middle of the Gangnam district. Entering the bookstore is like entering a new book itself: it immediately surrounds you with smells of paper and wood. The cozy store is the quintessential neighborhood bookstore with an impeccable curation of books from around the world. The back, where book events are held, is intimate and inviting, with a curve of chairs surrounding a large wooden table. The community of readers literally completes the circle. [End Page 25] Anton Hur Anton Hur is the translator of Violets, by Kyung-Sook Shin; of the 2022 International Booker Prize shortlisted Cursed Bunny, by Bora Chung, and of the longlisted Love in the Big City, by Sang Young Park; and contributor to Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (ed. Kavita Bhanot & Jeremy Tiang; see WLT, July 2022, 6). Krys Lee Krys Lee is the author of the story collection Drifting House and the novel How I Became a North Korean and the translator of I Hear Your Voice and Diary of a Murderer, by Young-ha Kim. She has won the Rome Prize in Literature, the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and the Honor Title in Adult Fiction Literature from the Asian/Pacific American Libraries Association. Lee teaches creative writing at Underwood International College in Seoul. Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

OwnVoices and Asian Identities Represented in Young Adult Fiction

The term OwnVoices has been used since 2015 by librarians, publishers, and others to indicate that a book’s protagonist and its author share a marginalized identity. However, conversations about who can or should write literature with diverse subjects are not new. The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of OwnVoices through an analysis of young adult books published in 2018 and 2019. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center provided data about the books for young people published within the time frame. Books by authors and/or about characters described by the CCBC as Asian were analyzed in greater detail. In all 247 books were of interest, which included those that had an Asian author, an Asian protagonist, or both. This analysis seeks to use descriptive statistics to better understand the OwnVoices label.

Der Traum als Raum politischer Bildung in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur

Based on an international corpus of children and young adult fiction, I would like to explore the question of how ‘the political’ is articulated in these texts and what role dreams play for the discussion of political ideas. Dream narratives blur the boundary between reality and fiction and thus create a virtual space in which the young protagonists can experience themselves. Since modernity, children and young adult literature is supposed to address the process of personality development of both, the juvenile heroes and readers. On closer inspection, however, one realises that the articulation of personal dilemmas is often linked to social and political issues. This paper thus aims to investigate the interaction of the political and the personal, which places the ethical moment at the centre of political discourse, within the fictional dream worlds.

Feeling against the plot: an African diaspora feminist politics of happiness

ABSTRACT This essay maps the uneasy terrains of Black feminist happiness in the diaspora as a complex reckoning with radical political and social theories of subject formation Refusing analytics that prioritize loss, injury, lack, stasis, and trauma as the defining features of the Black diaspora, African diaspora feminist happiness displaces whiteness and the West as its referents in favour of more difficult intimacies across Black geographies that imagine fleeting alliances, inevitable inequity, and tension across diaspora communities rather than similarity or belonging. This essay traces texts, often in popular genres, that plot intimacies that acknowledge legacies of injury but seek out other roots and routes to define the present and futures of Black feminine subjects, futures often knowingly in tension with the given materiality and resources of diaspora life, and in tension with the dominant modes of critique hewing toward death and pessimism in the field of Black diaspora studies. Through the global self-help genre, the Afropolitan literary novel, African young adult fiction, and sensational Kenyan LGBTQ cinema, this article traces the generic plots of African diaspora feminist happiness to find neither neoliberal hailed subjects nor subversive resistance. If in the masculine diaspora imagination, coming together via racial and political identity equals a new sense of community, the feminist genealogies that this essay traces through diaspora happiness are uncomfortable and deeply self-conscious about their traffic in capital and middle-class resources and desire. The texts that I look to do not attempt to erase, flatten, or romanticize difference into the poles of resistance and complicity, but instead define diaspora feminist happiness through tension and temporariness. These texts use diaspora pathways as structures of feeling conducive and conductive of happiness even as they do not engage the romance of racial, political, or even ethical community to find them.

Adolescence and Artificial Intelligence: Posthumanism and Maturation in Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff's Illuminae Files

Young adult science fiction holds in tension the ideological position that adolescents are posthuman and a socializing mandate to enable adolescent maturation into normative, humanist adulthood. Frequently, this tension is resolved through the rejection of technology, but recent young adult science fiction interrogates and challenges traditional maturation. Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff's Illuminae Files series demonstrates how hierarchical social, legal, and political structures categorize and control adolescents to encourage their traditional maturation, but it also suggests the empowerment and agency possible through posthumanist alternatives, such as the cyborgian hybridity of an adolescent and artificial intelligence.

Their Worlds Felt Smaller: Rebuilding Classroom Communities in Pandemic Times

After several semesters of isolated online learning, students needed opportunities to reconnect; reading young adult science fiction—a genre of what-ifs—helped a class of seniors discuss how identities affect relationships.

Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children by Emily Midkiff

Reviewed by: Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children by Emily Midkiff Karen Sands-O'Connor (bio) Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children. By Emily Midkiff. University Press of Mississippi, 2022. Interest in, and focus on, science fiction for children has historically been limited. There was a mini-boom in scholarship in the 1990s, with Gary Westfahl's article in Foundation (Winter 1994) on "The Genre that Evolved: On Science Fiction as Children's Literature," C. W. Sullivan III's Science Fiction for Young Readers (Greenwood 1993), and my own work with Marietta Frank, Back in the Spaceship Again (Greenwood 1999) all looking at fiction for progressively younger readers. These works tried to define what science fiction for children meant, and why it was an important genre, in literature ranging from the originally-adult-audienced work of Asimov and Bradbury to space race series from authors such as Robert Heinlein for what we now call tweens and young adults to Jane Yolen's Commander Toad and Joanna Cole's Magic School Bus series for the picture book crowd. Between 2009 and 2014, Farrah Mendelsohn wondered if children's science fiction existed in The Inter-galactic Playground (2009); Neighbors and Rankin focused on children's science fiction film and television in The Galaxy Is Rated G (2011); and several critics began to focus on the ethics and presentation of science in fields such as biotechnology and environmentalism in science fiction for children. Notably, Noga Applebaum in Representations of Technology in Science Fiction for Young People (Routledge 2009) suggested that most children's science fiction was anti-technology in contrast to science fiction for adults. Recent books have examined gender and racial diversity (Ziegler and Richards 2020; Thomas 2019), and educational issues (Kupferman and Gibbons 2019; Lindgren-Leavenworth and Manni, 2021). Emily Midkiff 's Equipping Space Cadets brings together many of these concerns, but focuses particularly on the definition of science fiction and the reading experiences of young children with it. Midkiff herself notes the fraught debate over the definition of children's science fiction in her first chapter, "Definitions and Evaluations," spending several pages over the debate between fantasy and science fiction. She argues, "Insisting that primary sf distance itself from fantasy holds children's literature to different standards than adult literature" and advocates a broad definition of science fiction for children that includes "space opera and silliness and pop culture shenanigans" (24, 25). Here, Midkiff runs up against one of the defining arguments about children's literature in general: not what it is but what it is for. Children's literature is defined by different standards than adult literature, and has been since John Newbery advertised his children's books as encompassing "Instruction with Delight." If books are meant to teach, then the scientific aspects of science fiction for children become critical—and bad science, fuzzy science, and magical explanations all push much of children's science fiction into the [End Page 340] realm of fantasy (and not necessarily good fantasy). But Midkiff is not really concerned with scientific accuracy—indeed, she is not really concerned with books in general, at least in terms of literary analysis. Her chapter on "Comprehending Genre" reveals this clearly, as her focus is on skills being developed in the reader rather than on what individual books contain. Arguing that many children learn about science fiction from film and television, particularly Star Wars and its "series, spinoffs, and films" (39), she suggests that "Children who are familiar with space travel and spaceship crews can approach the story knowing something of what to expect and use it . . . to help comprehend what they are reading" (39). This technique of using prior knowledge to make predictions and cement definitions is true of reading in general, but Midkiff 's explanation—which again advocates for a broad (or "fuzzy") definition of science fiction, does not account for how this can lead to mistakes in comprehension. All science fiction is fiction, but not all fiction is science fiction. Skilled readers can tell the difference between a story that is about a scientific principle or hypothesis (for example, a book where a character has to adjust between...

#Ownvoices, Disruptive Platforms, and Reader Reception in Young Adult Publishing

The concept of #ownvoices writing has gained traction in contemporary publishing as both a genre of reader interest and a focus for debates about authors’ rights to write cross-culturally. This paper examines tensions the #ownvoices movement reveals between the commissioning, publishing, and critical reception of a book, using debate about Craig Silvey’s Honeybee, an Australian novel focalized through a young trans protagonist but written by a straight male author. Drawing on the theory of recognition, it analyzes author and publisher media interviews, social media, and literary reviews in mainstream publications, which are given context through with selected interviews with Australian publishers. Misrepresentation and appropriation are concerns for many readers, while judgements about aesthetic quality vary. Structures within the book industries limit the economic representation of diverse creators which, in turn, has implications for the diversity of experience represented in young adult fiction and its literary quality.

Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction ed. by Meghan Gilbert-Hickey and Miranda A. Green-Barteet

Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction ed. by Meghan Gilbert-Hickey and Miranda A. Green-Barteet

Girlhood, Gazing, and Fatness

How can the fields of fat studies and girlhood studies inform each other in literary analysis? In this article, we analyse how being a girl means negotiating fat using the Swedish young adult novel Trettonde sommaren (Thirteenth Summer, 2018) by Gabriella Sköldenberg as an example. In the novel, surveillance of the teenage girl’s body weight – which can be seen as a manifestation of fat haunting – is introduced by the mothers of two cousins, Angelica and Sandra, during a summer stay at their grandfather’s home in the countryside. Although the two girls are not described as fat, thin normativity becomes a key issue in the narrative through their mothers’ supervision. This leads to the confrontation with and death of another character who is perceived as fat by the girls and their mothers: the friendly and motherly Rut. The interplay between different gazes is at the core of our analysis and helps us explore how discourses of girlhood and fatness intertwine in the novel. We show how Angelica moves from being influenced by the mothers’ and Sandra’s thin normative gaze, to adopting an oppositional girl gaze which encompasses what we refer to as a fat gaze, a gaze that looks with the fat character rather than at her. Our analysis of gazes demonstrates the benefit of a combined focus on girlhood and fatness in approaching the novel. From a broader perspective, it also shows how the fields of fat studies and girlhood studies can enrich each other and together offer answers to how body size is experienced and conceptualised in relation to girlhood in young adult fiction.

The Power of Names: Name Translation in Young Adult Fiction

The Power of Names: Name Translation in Young Adult Fiction

Teaching Activism: The Feminist Pedagogical Possibilities of Why We Fly

Young adult fiction possesses the pedagogical power to educate young readers about activism, and more recently, authors of the genre have answered the call from young aspiring activists to deliver narratives that are reflective of and relevant to their own lives and communities. Published in October of 2021, the novel Why We Fly illustrates the complexities of participating in social justice activism while also providing entertaining and inspiring characters. In honor of Colin Kaepernick, authors Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal craft the fictional hero Cody Knight who encourages the text’s young protagonists to look at the world around them to identify injustice. Using critical feminist theory in an analysis of the text, I highlight the ways in which the novel guides readers to understand movement building and community outreach while also requiring them to reflect on their complicity in systems of oppression. From a feminist perspective, the young adult novel Why We Fly is a narrative that would enable teachers to present students with the opportunity to analyze systems of oppression and power structures, develop a critical consciousness, and question ways we privilege knowledge and ways of knowing.

Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction ed. by Meghan Gilbert-Hickey and Miranda A. Green-Barteet

Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction ed. by Meghan Gilbert-Hickey and Miranda A. Green-Barteet

Young Adult Vulnerabilities in the Fiction of a Ugandan Woman Writer

Questions of identity, power, autonomy and vulnerability carry a particular weight in cultures that have emerged from colonialism. Although few writers of fiction focus on the conflicts between African and European characters, a focus on power and marginalisation remains. One category in which this focus may be plainly seen is writing for and about young people. The study’s aim was to analyse young adult fiction written by a Ugandan female author, Barbara Kimenye to investigate this writing to find out how young adult vulnerability is depicted in literature. Although literature targeting young people in Uganda has flourished and though issues of limited representation have been scrutinised in literary studies, like gender discrimination, very limited attention has been accorded young adult representation in literature. This research analyses fiction written by a female author Barbara Kimenye to expand knowledge about the criticism of young adult representation in literature with particular focus on young adult vulnerability in an adult dominated world. The methodology was mainly qualitative research design, where a document analysis method was used to aid analysis and make critical appreciation of the fictional works. The study investigated the state of young adult characters in literature with special focus on their vulnerability.

Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others ed. by Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi

Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others ed. by Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi

Reaction against Subordination of Women Observed from the Struggle of Hawa in Mabala’s Hawa the Bus Driver

This study examined Richard Mabala’s young adult prose fiction: Hawa the Bus Driver. The study used Social Critical Theory as a tool of analysis. Examining the work thematically, the reading revealed a struggle of the major character Hawa in Hawa the Bus Driver. The character is portrayed to have: recognition of female potentiality and the urge of equality in male dominated society. The study shows that the author in this work has drawn the characters in such a way that at the exposition of the narrative, she encounters male chauvinism and the pain of gender stereotype. Nevertheless, she emerges as heroine at the resolution by acquiring recognition and acceptance in her society. A careful reading indicates that the author, through creative writing, intends to inculcate gender education in society and he chooses juvenile audience as the area of commencement.

Stylistics and children’s literature

This article constitutes an introduction to the five articles that appear in this special issue. This framing process starts by highlighting the sparse, yet important, work that has been conducted over the past 20 years on children’s literature in the field of stylistics. The focus in the article then turns to a more general discussion of the language of children’s literature. Here, in this chronological overview of language usage in books written for children, an outline is sketched from the writers and philosophers of the enlightenment up to contemporary debates on literacy, cognition and theory of mind. In the section that follows, the five studies that appear in this special issue are briefly synopsized. What becomes apparent is the wide range of methodological approaches that have been taken by the scholars in question to analyze the texts that are under investigation, in both quantitative and qualitative ways. The article ends with a plea for more stylistic work to be conducted in the areas of both children’s literature and young adult fiction. This is especially pertinent because stylisticians possess the key linguistic and analytic skills and tools to help, in interdisciplinary settings, to address current social, emotional and cognitive challenges pertaining to child development through literacy and through reading in particular.

Their Own Devices: Steampunk Airships as Heterotopias of Crisis and Deviance

Michel Foucault uses a sailing vessel as the exemplar of his theory of heterotopia because of its mobility. The lateral and vertical mobility of the steampunk airship indicates the potential for an even greater exemplar of heterotopia, particularly of Foucault’s defining principles of heterotopic crisis and deviance. These principles are explored onboard the steampunk airships of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy and Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series, resulting in travel towards progressive social frontiers of gender and race. The protagonists of the Leviathan trilogy move from a position of crisis to deviance, as mediated through the friendship and romance of two representatives of warring factions. In contrast, the heroine of the Finishing School series moves from deviance to crisis as she navigates the vagaries of gender and racial identity. These airship heterotopias of young adult fiction, which not only descend geographically but also socially, cross liminal crisis spaces of class, race, gender, and identity to craft literary cartographies for these social frontiers, providing readers with literary maps for their uncertain real worlds of crisis.

Fictional Escapism and Identity Formation: A Duoethnographic Exploration of Stories and Adolescent Development

Young Adult Literature has often been utilized to explore reader responses especially in attention to how fiction provides space to explore identity and one’s place within a larger societal context. In this duoethnography, we explored the importance of children and young adult literature’s influence on our own identity development. We share our primary findings that highlight the ways reading stories has provided escape, space for self-discovery and questioning, as well as pathways of learning to cultivate empathy and work towards social justice. We agree with Ellis’s (2014) argument that storytellers must share stories in a way that makes lessons or emotional effects apparent–for it is in those effects that we notice our connections to ourselves and others. We therefore share connections between our own experiences and the larger implications of reading young adult fiction as a tool for both individual and collective identity formation.