Young Adult Literature Research Articles

The Making of the Docile Female Body in Korean American Young Adult Literature: A Feminist Foucauldian Reading of An Na’s The Fold (2008)

The Making of the Docile Female Body in Korean American Young Adult Literature: A Feminist Foucauldian Reading of An Na’s The Fold (2008)

Temporalities Beyond Transition: Form, Genre, and Contemporary Trans Novels

ABSTRACT: Popular narratives about trans identity traditionally rely on a metaphorical understanding of trans embodiment as a linear and unidirectional journey. This paper discusses how this temporality is questioned, reshaped, interrupted, and sidestepped in five recent novels by trans and non-binary authors: Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby (2021), Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2017), Juno Dawson’s Wonderland (2020), Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), and Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless (2021). The spatiotemporal organization of these novels negotiates the linearities that are conventionally employed in relation to trans stories, as each text engages with the conventions of specific genres—from the Bildungsroman to the picaresque, from science fiction to “chick lit,” from young adult literature to horror—in order to move beyond the structure of the personal transition journey.

Plants in Children's and Young Adult Literature ed. by Melanie Duckworth and Lykke Guanio-Uluru (review)

Plants in Children's and Young Adult Literature ed. by Melanie Duckworth and Lykke Guanio-Uluru (review)

Haunted Houses and Ghostly Homes: Kacen Callender's Hurricane Child as a Rewriting of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John

This essay responds to the dearth of analysis of young adult literature in postcolonial scholarship by placing Kacen Callender's LGBTQ+ middle-grade novel Hurricane Child (2018) adjacent to Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John (1987), a foundational text of contemporary Caribbean literature. I employ Homi Bhabha's reformulation of Sigmund Freud's unheimlich, or "unhomely," to interrogate how both novels complicate ideas of literal home and island home as places of fun, comfort, and safety. Just as the nostalgic image of the adoring mother discombobulates Kincaid's Annie, the figure of the physically absent mother plagues Callender's Caroline. Both characters live in symbolically haunted houses. Additionally, shame lurks in the corners of Caroline's psyche as she comes to recognize her budding same-sex desires, which put her at risk of being ghosted, or erased, as a valued member of her community. Extending the psychic trauma from the narrators to the histories of their islands, and relying on critical work on the Gothic by Avery F. Gordon, Maisha Wester, and others, this essay excavates politically charged depictions of landscapes for signs of literal spirits and evidence of haunting by slavery, colonialism, and the neocolonial systems of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Teaching Social Justice Through Gothic Young Adult Literature

Teaching Social Justice Through Gothic Young Adult Literature

De-Dehumanising the Autistic Other: Between the Image of “Beast” and “Being” in J. K. Rowling’s ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ - Screenplay and Book

The representation of autism in literature is a novelty of a delicate sense for what impact it can have on readers. Autism shows more frequently in the lines of Young-Adult fiction (YA), a genre known for its large audiences, which makes contemplating the image of an autistic person, as an actual character or a theme, either a means of access or a block to public awareness of the spectrum, respectively. The selected YA fiction works for this paper are Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, as screenplay (2018) and book (2001). The screenplay is not an adaptation of the book, but a background to the times when a character wrote his study book on the beasts that surrounds his environment. In the works, the use of terms like “monster” and “beast” seems to refer to a dehumanised image of the represented, which raises questions on why the writer would allude readers to relate autism to monstrosity; is she maintaining the habit of using illness as a narrative thematic tool or does she suggest otherwise? In order to formulate a ground for these inquiries, we will visit the text in relation to Lacan and Derrida’s thoughts on “Subjectivity” and how it defines fellowship from alterity and monstrosity. The objective of this research is to investigate the representation of autism in Rowling’s screenplay while backing up with examples from the book to see how far it meets the real or contrastingly contributes to reinforcing another stereotypical other.

The Depiction of the Loser Teenager in the Film and Television Adaptations of John Green’s Young Adult Novels

In the last few decades, the teen movie genre has left behind the genre of light comedies or farce comedies and deals with more substantial and fundamental issues concerning teenagers and young adults. In the literary universe of John Green, which has been the basis and source of inspiration for the corresponding film and television adaptations, the form of the good-natured and well-intentioned loser teenager dominates. The loser teenager watches with longing and anxiety the lives of his popular peers, longing to be given a chance to join their company. when this finally happens, he finds out that things are not always as they seem and the values that decorate his universe are not as meaningless as he initially thought. The heroes in Green's books possess culture, dreams and ambitions, and an already complete personal universe that most of their popular peers lack, lost in the abyss of adolescence, its changes, and dilemmas. their depiction in the mass entertainment media of film and television reflects also social changes in teen and school culture, s well as the broadening of personal outlooks and expectations of teenagers themselves. in the recent article, we are going to analyse the type of loser geek/nerd teenager hero in the film and television adaptations of his young adult novel Paper Towns (2015) and Looking for Alaska (2019).

캐나다 아동청소년 과학소설

The present study overviews Canadian science fiction for children and young adults in its early history. Canada’s multiculturalism is a great resource for diversity on their literary works, but at the same time, it often turns into concerns on their national identity. Canadian novels portray this unique trait in their stories with three major features. By contrasting the technology-dominated society with the nature-friendly one, they ultimately aim for an idyllic society. Also, the works express distrust of technology and progress with concerns about negative effects on the global environment. Finally, they lie on the blurred border between fantasy adventure and science fiction. Unlike mainstream science fiction novels, Canadian children’s SF writers take the subjects of science, nature, and humans more seriously. Depicting a variety of possible future societies, they continue to emphasize both the harmony of technology and the nature and the exploration of human identity. This originality distinguishes them from other countries’ works and are sufficiently attractive to many young readers.

Sex Education and Translation of Books for Children and Young Adults – Ideologies, Characteristics, Controversies

This article discusses sex education books for children and young adults published in Poland between 1945 and 2018. After defining the ideological profile of 111 examined publications as either conservative, moderately conservative, neutral, moderately liberal or liberal, the authors compare the whole set of translated books (translations) with the whole set of books by Polish authors (non-translations), taking into account the date of publication and the age of the intended reader. The analysis shows that translations differ from texts written originally in Polish, because they promote other values. Polish books, especially those published before 1989, are usually neutral or moderately conservative, while translations mostly propagate moderately liberal or liberal ideologies. There is also a close correlation between those ideological categories and the age of the reader: books for the youngest audience are ideologically charged to only a small degree, and the ideological content increases with the age of the reader. This seems to be related to the larger number of translations in the older age groups. Translations, which usually reflect a liberal ideology, fill a gap in Polish culture by complementing or replacing the conservative sex education available in Polish schools, and by encouraging Polish authors to write sex education books expressing similar views.

The aesthetic and the pedagogical – two opposing notions? A comparative analysis of Polish and British blogs about children’s literature

Children’s literature belongs simultaneously to the literary and the educational sys-tem – this is why the notions of the aesthetic and the pedagogical seem to be crucial in its study. They are often seen as opposing each other. The dichotomy between them appears to be even more interesting when approached from a cross-cultural perspective. Whereas English authors of books for the young reader were among the first to support the development of the children’s book into an art form in its own right (around the middle of the 19th century), their Polish counterparts followed suit decades later, as earliest attempts at writing artistically and without excessive didacticism appeared in the 1930s. In this context, a question arises whether and to what extent these traditional approaches to children’s literature and critique are still topical. I will address this question on the basis of a qualitative analysis of themed blogs written about literature for the young reader published in Poland and in the United Kingdom in the recent years. Interestingly, blogs discussing children’s literature are not addressed directly to the child, but to the “mediator circle”, or “gate-keepers”, primarily parents, teachers and librarians. With the help of content analysis and discourse analysis tools, I will try to determine the main themes present in their discussion of children’s and young adult literature, and to address them from the perspective of the traditional dichotomy between the aesthetic and the pedagogical.

Impact analysis of young adult literature on the morals of school students using parametric statistical techniques

This study aimed to investigate the effect of young adult literature (YAL) on the morals of students in high school. This research is an adapted form of quasi-experimental cum survey design. A sample of one hundred and forty (140) students was randomly selected through the simple random sampling (SRS) technique from the target population. The Attitude to Morals Questionnaire (AMQ) instrument was utilized for data collection. The reliability and validity of the research instrument was assessed using Cronbach Alpha with result of 0.91. Descriptive analysis and two independent sample t-tests were applied to the data and all test were computed at the 0.05 levels of significance. The findings of this study revealed that young adult literature significantly impact on the morals of the high school students. It was also discovered that honesty and respect for elders varies significantly in both the experimental and control groups. More so, the result showed that tolerance of male does not vary significantly with that of the female students in the experimental group. Schools should equip their libraries with sufficient novels on young adult literatures, the teachers should dwell more on the plot, theme and characters in the novels. Students should be guided and emphasis should be made on the need to read young adult literatures, and more time should be allotted on the school timetable for reading of young adult literature.

Parenting Style Influences on Mothers and Daughters' Relationship on Astonishing Color of After

Young Adult fiction's popularity is at its peak right now due to the topic being related to the problems that teenagers are facing in today's era. One of those novels is Astonishing Color of After, a novel about the mother and daughter’s relationship between two generations, Dory with her mother, and Dory with her daughter, Leigh. This novel intrigues me to analyze the characteristics of Dory's and Dory's mother's parenting style, the influence of their parenting styles, and how it affects the mother's and daughter's relationship and their daughter's behavior problems. To analyze these three points, I will apply the authoritarian parenting style and permissive parenting style based on the types of parenting theory by Diana Baumrind. My analysis will show how Dory's and Dory's mother's parenting style is influenced by the culture and childhood trauma, and how their parenting styles affect the relationship between them and their daughter as well as their daughters' behavioral problems. This thesis will end with a conclusion that there is a line between when the parents become authority figures and when the parents become the companion of their children.

Laurie Halse Andersen’s speak: the graphic novel: creating and resisting aesthetic distancing to discuss the trauma of sexual violence

ABSTRACT In 2018, Laurie Halse Andersen’s groundbreaking novel Speak (1999) was adapted into a graphic novel, a form that effectively combines visual and verbal storytelling techniques. In stories about sexual assault, it is common for authors and illustrators to employ aesthetic distancing in children’s and YA literature. Aesthetic distancing includes the use of both visual and verbal techniques to provide a sense of what Jacqueline F. Eastman calls ‘controlled danger’ where the narrative becomes ‘comfortably exciting rather than overwhelming’ (75). By drawing on art and visual design theory and principles, this article will analyse where Speak: The Graphic Novel (2018) uses aesthetic distancing, but more importantly, where it is rejected as a mode of representation. I suggest that Andersen and the illustrator Emily Carroll take a middle ground approach, by which I refer to the fact that although aesthetic distancing is used, the narrative still presents threatening text and images to demonstrate that healing from sexual violence is an on-going process. Specifically, I analyse the jaggedness of the artistic style, vague pronoun usage and language, power relations, intertextuality, and the symbol of the mouth. I conclude by considering the ethical ramifications of employing aesthetic distancing in stories about sexual assault.

Matt Ottley: inspiration through sound and colour

Born in 1962 in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, I am an artist, writer, and composer. I live with the condition of synaesthesia, so sound, colour, and shape have always been intricately connected for me, and the compositions for my paintings often come directly from music. I have created around 30 picture books for children and young adults, although many of them are suitable for audiences of all ages. Some of my most awarded titles are Requiem for a Beast (2007), Teacup (by Rebecca Young, 2015), The Incredible Freedom Machines (by Kirli Saunders, 2018), and How to Make a Bird (by Meg McKinlay, 2020).

Vladimir Beekman, Aatomik ja fosforiidisõda / Vladimir Beekman, Atom-Boy, and the Phosphorite War

Kirjanik Vladimir Beekman kirjutas Nõukogude Eesti lastele kaheosalise raamatu nimega „Aatomik“ (1959) ning „Aatomik ja Küberneetiline Karu“ (1968), kus uraanituuma lõhustumisel tekkinud energiale on antud inimeselaadne kuju. Piiritu jõuga peategelane osaleb looduse ümberkujundamisplaanides, millel on suur keskkonnamõju. Raamatud järgivad Nõukogude Liidu tuumaenergeetika arendusplaane, nii nn rahuaatomi kui ka külma sõja jutupunkte. Artiklis on võrreldud raamatuis kujutatud tegevusi tõelisuses aset leidnud sündmustega, uuritud kirjutamiskonteksti ning teema levikut lastekirjanduses. Fosforiidikaevandamise ohu algusaegadel ilmus Beekmanil aga keskkonnakatastroofi eest hoiatav romaan „Eesli aasta“ (1979).
 
 Summary
 In Soviet Estonia, Vladimir Beekman (1929–2009), a writer with a degree in engineering, wrote a two-story sequence for children: Aatomik (‘The Atom-Boy’, 1959) and its sequel Aatomik ja Küberneetiline Karu (‘The Atom-Boy and the Cybernetic Bear’, 1968), in which the energy generated by the fission of uranium nuclei was given a human form. The publishing of the books was followed by puppet-animation films. The protagonist, a boy with immense power, is involved in several plans of transforming the natural world, projects that had or would have had major environmental impact and caused catastrophes. The stories follow the Soviet Union’s nuclear development plans, both the narratives introducing the “Atoms for Peace” policy and the Cold War propaganda. The article juxtaposes the adventures of the Atom-Boy with the nuclear tests and the achievements of the nuclear industry in the Soviet Union.
 Beekman began his literary career as a poet, eagerly reflecting the ideals of Soviet society, including the Cold War propaganda and the nuclear arsenal development. He had a background that suited the regime, having spent part of his boyhood in a Soviet orphanage and making his literary debut in the Stalinist period. He graduated from the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute as a chemical engineer, but made his career as a literary administrator, serving as a long-standing secretary and chairman of the Writers’ Union. He left behind a valuable legacy as a translator of Western children’s literature into Estonian (Selma Lagerlöf, Astrid Lindgren, Tove Jansson, Annie M. G. Schmidt, etc).
 Beekman’s stories of the Atom-Boy fit into the tradition of writing about nuclear energy for children. Both Soviet and Western literatures provide examples of this genre in children’s and young adult literature. Such books might belong to the genre of popular science for kids (The Walt Disney Story of Our Friend the Atom), face the fears or casualties of the nuclear accidents in power plants (Joe Holliday’ s young adult book series in the 1950s, Leonid Daien’s Chornobyl – the Bitter Grass), or advocate and justify this energy source. Beekman’s stories belong to the last category: the experiments of the Atom-Boy finally all end well, without doing irreversible damage to the environment. He even melts the ice of the Arctic Ocean with the help of nuclear power.
 As nuclear testing and the related problems and accidents were classified in the Soviet Union, it remains unclear whether Beekman's tales of the Atom-Boy belong to the realm of popular science or science fiction for kids. They are usually given the label of ‘the fairy-tale of the Century of Technology’. The stories follow the Soviet Union’s propaganda points on nuclear power, but also on nuclear arms race.
 In 1979 Beekman published the novel Eesli aasta (‘The year of the donkey’), which warned of environmental disaster during the early days of the phosphate mining plans. The Writer’s Union played a role in the campaign against phosphate mining, known as the Phosphorite War.

Rebekah Fitzsimmons and Casey Alane Wilson (red.), Beyond The Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction

Review/Recension

The Theme of Outsiderness in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature: Self-Fashioning Identities, Canons, and Fields of Study

This review article focuses on the critical anthology Nerds, Goths, Geeks and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, edited by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera (2020). The goal of this collection of essays is to fill the gap that exists in both Latinx cultural studies and children’s and young adult (YA) literature scholarship: the focus on US Latinx children’s and YA literature. Its second goal is to concentrate on Latina and Latino outsiders, who are also ignored in the above-mentioned fields of study, even when it comes to nerds, goths, geeks, and freaks. The anthology offers a necessary exploration of the double marginalisation of Latinx and queer, nerdy, geeky, or otherwise non-conformist teenagers and young adults. The authors analyse Latinx YA texts to capture the strategies and practices the protagonists use to reject or question the dominant Latinx/Chicanx identity scripts, self-fashion a new identity, or, simply, to survive. The article outlines the key problems and themes of the anthology and describes two additional goals of the editors: to create and reaffirm an emerging Latinx YA literary canon as well as to establish an academic field of Latinx YA literature studies. Moreover, key concepts from Latinx cultural theory are sketched out, and special emphasis is placed on the difference between theme and theory, which serves as the starting point for evaluating the collection’s achievements and shortcomings.

The Category Is “Pandemic Queer”: Reading, Connecting, and Reimagining Literacy with LGBTQ+ Youth in the Age of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the ensuing lockdown and political turmoil, ruptured many young people’s experiences and well-being, particularly students who face additional marginalization due to systemic oppression. A national survey conducted by the Trevor Project (2021) found that nearly 70% of LGBTQ youth noted that their health was “poor” most or all of the time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Factors contributing to this deterioration include LGBTQ youth being isolated from the supportive communities formed at school, lacking access to social services provided by schools, and being quarantined with family members who were unsupportive (Cohen, 2021; Valencia, 2020). These fissures in support and resource structures curtailed potentially affirming and integral education, social, and emotional experiences, particularly for LGBTQ youth who thrived in traditional schooling settings. However, it is also important to note that even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools were not idealized institutions for LGBTQ youth. K-12 schools, situated in the broader socio-political landscape of the United States, are bastions of homo-, trans-, and queerphobia (Mayo, 2014). Still, many LGBTQ young people employed resilience and ingenuity to create affirming and loving social circles, which were thus interrupted by restrictions, trauma, and isolation during the pandemic. As LGBTQ educators we sought to co-create an online community that could reflect the brilliance and joy of LGBTQ youth during the 2020-2021 school year. Through both our own experiences and the research, we know that LGBTQ youth find ways to construct community through online avenues, even when said avenues are limited and flawed, such as Tumblr (Cavalcante, 2019; Haimson, et al., 2021; Wargo, 2017). Building on our experiences as secondary English language arts teachers, we constructed a national online book club dedicated to reading, analyzing, and celebrating LGBTQ young adult literature with LGBTQ youth. After a summer of planning, we launched the online book club that resulted in over 125 secondary students from across the United States (and some international students) joining us for a year to engage in readings of Abdi Nazemian’s Like a Love Story (2019), Dean Atta’s Black Flamingo (2019), Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016), and Mark Oshiro’s Anger is a Gift (2018). This article details how we structured a community of readers who worked to analyze young adult literature through intersectional and anti-oppressive lenses (Blackburn & Smith, 2010; Durand, 2015; Herman-Wilmarth & Ryan, 2015), deepen their critical consciousness relating to contemporary LGBTQ socio-political topics (Kelly & Currie, 2020), and leveraged social media and online avenues to construct community that expanded the boundaries of school hallways (Lucero, 2017; Mayo, 2014). Collectively, we seek to illustrate how LGBTQ+ communities (and queer pedagogies) can flourish and develop outside the limitations of K-12 institutions.

Expanding Preservice Teachers’ Conceptions about Disability Through Young Adult Literature

This article provides information and resources to help special education teacher educators improve preservice teachers’ competence for working with disabled1 students and addressing ableism in their classrooms, by incorporating young adult (YA) literature into special education teacher preparation experiences. Embedding YA literature with representations of disability can address ableism in education by helping preservice special education teachers to conceptualize disabled adolescents differently. Current approaches to teacher education may reinforce dysconscious ableism (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017) and undergird educational segregation on the basis of disability. After reviewing current literature on addressing ableism during teacher preparation and using YA literature in teacher education, this article models how special education teacher educators can critically examine YA texts by providing criteria for evaluating representations of disability and a unit plan with three lessons for use in an introductory special education course. A bibliography of young adult books featuring characters with disabilities is also provided.

From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families: The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives by Abbye E. Meyer

Reviewed by: From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families: The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives by Abbye E. Meyer Megan Marshall (bio) From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families: The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives. By Abbye E. Meyer. University Press of Mississippi, 2022. Historically, the disabled experience is not a prevalent subject in literature, and until relatively recently, memorable novels featuring nuanced protagonists with disabilities have been a rarity. More often, characters with disabilities have been misrepresented, treated as props for central characters, and/or existed as a series of one-dimensional tropes. While the same can be said when narrowing the focus to the relatively modern field of children's and young adult literature, Abbye E. Meyer's seven-chapter monograph From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families seeks to bring this conversation to the forefront. Citing the unique parallels between the disabled and adolescent experience, she offers critical discussion of several young adult novels and other texts to illustrate how narratives of disability written for (and about) young adults are a rich site for considering the intersections of literary and disability studies. Meyer's first chapter situates her work in both fields, pointing to a dearth of scholarship focused on representations of disability in literature, especially in relation to narratives that feature adolescent characters. She cites a handful of well-known canonical exemplars, naming texts and characters that represent the "unease" of adolescence and/or disability, noting that while these examples are not young adult literature (perhaps the closest being Alcott's Little Women, which was published in 1868, nearly a century before the true emergence of the field), they help to provide a framework for considering adolescent and/or disabled characters as troubled occupants of liminal spaces. Meyers builds on this by positioning young adult literary texts and the "problem novel" subgenre at the intersection of adolescence and disability, making the argument that this unique relationship has the potential to disrupt harmful tropes, change mainstream thinking about disability, and (perhaps most radically) forge a permanent and powerful connection between narratives of adolescence and disability. In the next chapter, "Wallflowers: Disability as the Young Adult Voice," Meyer builds her discussion around two prominent novels from the mid-twentieth century—The Bell Jar (Plath) and Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)—specifically, the quintessential "young adult voice" alongside "unmistakable symptoms of mental illness" in both Esther and Holden (13). She draws a parallel between these characters to those in more recent work, such as Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) and Leviathan's Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist (2006), referring to commonalities in voice, concerns, and approaches to making sense of the world. Her analysis of [End Page 429] these texts posits that the narrator-protagonist voices of disabled and adolescent characters are inextricably linked, particularly regarding features of mental illness. The pattern for the next four chapters emerges in the third chapter, "Fruits: Disability as Literary Metaphor," where Meyer explains the literary tendency to depict the disabled experience as one synonymous with affliction and suffering. She points to the use of disabled characters as thematic devices, referencing M. T. Anderson's 2002 novel Feed, citing his treatment of disability to symbolize what is broken in society to critique the dangers inherent in corporate culture. The result is characters (and readers) being led to "prefer nondisabled identities" (38). In contrast, she highlights texts that complicate conceptions of disability by conflating it with adolescence, such as portrayed by the Lisbon girls in The Virgin Suicides (Eugenides). Here, Meyer argues, the story structure is nuanced enough to allow for complex character development via the collective memory of the plural voice of the (now) adult men who serve as narrators. The fourth chapter centers on "Freaks"—particularly the ways they serve to foster growth and development in nondisabled characters. Meyer describes how visual differences invoke the label of monster or freak, which is capitalized upon in narratives where such characters are used for the development of other (nondisabled) characters. She contends that "freaks" are two-dimensional, existing primarily to elicit action and responses from more prominent characters and uses the well-known (and often-taught) 2012 novel Wonder (Palacio) to...