Youth Fiction Research Articles

Effacing difference? The Multiple Images of South African Adolescents

South African young adult fiction has not generally been the focus of academic study. The market for books by local writers is small in comparison with works emanating from the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Indeed, the local market is largely driven by educational needs, as sales often depend on whether or not a work is prescribed for schools. As a result, South African English language youth fiction largely focuses on issues in society that can spark discussion and debate among learnersEnglish in Africa Vol. 34 (2) 2007: pp. 35-50

Student-teachers and the themes of diversity and discrimination in South African youth fiction

Interaction with peers is central to the social development of student-teachers. Despite the democratic changes in South Africa in 1994, which resulted in integrated education, it is noticeable that many undergraduate student-teachers at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Education find it difficult to establish and maintain interracial and intercultural relationships with their peers. Exploring and discussing themes of race relations, discrimination and social rejection in young adult fiction during lectures and in tutorial groups offers students opportunities to imagine a world larger than their own. These discussions can help them , to construct wider friendships and bridge racial and cultural divides. All titles referred to in this article were published after 1990, and include the following: The strollers by Lesley Beake, The red-haired Khumalo by Elana Bregin, Dianne Case's 92 Queens Road, The mending season by Kagiso Lesego Molope and Jenny Robson's Because pula means rain. Students' res...

Realistic teenage fiction with a sexrelated theme: Readers’ responses to <i>Slinger-slinger</i> by Francois Bloemhof

Francois Bloemhof submitted his novel for teenagers, “Slinger-slinger” for the Sanlam competition for youth fiction in 1996. Eventually this prizewinner in the beginners’ category was published in 1997. The main theme of “Slinger-slinger” is the sexual awakening and identity of teenagers. A study was undertaken to obtain the opinions of teenage readers about the success of “Slinger-slinger” as a whole, as well as to gauge the success of integrating sexual aspects in this novel. The study also served to obtain information about the reading needs of teenage readers with regard to realistic teenage fiction and teenage fiction with a sex-related theme. The findings of the study underlying this article indicated that the participating teenage readers regarded “Slinger-slinger” as successful and interesting, and that they would like to read more realistic Afrikaans teenage fiction such as “Slinger-slinger”.

Youth Fiction

Youth Fiction

Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature Carole Ferrier (bio) Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature. By Clare Bradford. Melbourne: Melbourne P, 2001 In the Summer 2001 issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, John Cohen, in reviewing Heather Scutter's 1999 Displaced Fictions, raised the issue of how many international readers consider "that Australia produces YA literature that deserves reading" (106), with the implication that books about Australian literature should be more celebratory than critical. In the current context of a persistence of public denial in some influential quarters that Aboriginal people were massacred and their children stolen, this argument can become rather ingenuous. Clare Bradford aligns her race-cognisant perspective in Reading Race with the work of Richard Dyer, Anne McClintock, Stephen Slemon, Stephen Muecke, Robert Dixon, and others, but her stance is not counterposed to demonstrating that pleasure is to be gained from these texts—even though much of the engaged teacher's pleasure is likely to come from evaluating the knowledges that can be read in them. The discourses of, and surrounding, "children's literature" have never been innocent activities, and Bradford's central focus on representations of racial difference and race relations in Australian texts provides many striking instances of this. She ranges from analyzing the dominant liberal attitude of earlier periods: "I do not see what can be done for them, except we must [End Page 103] treat them [the indigenous population] kindly and not render their life more miserable than it is. They have no religion and therefore no hope," through to more diverse perspectives in writing by whites and indigenes (69). Many of the former deployed—and some still do"mechanisms of forgetfulness" in relation to what has been called the "black history" of white settlement (29). The mid-nineteenth-century adventure story The Boy in the Bush by Richard Rowe (his pseudonym was Edward Howe—confusing somebody in cover-production who has jumbled the names), provides Bradford's telling cover illustration in which two white boys gaze secretly at the Other, and observe: "The black fellows were in a very savage mood"—as indeed the boys' white relations became when some of their tribe were similarly killed in frontier violence. There are several levels of innocence that might be deconstructed here. Bradford's book finds itself wanting to burst the boundaries of the category of the "children's literature" of her (or perhaps the publisher's?) title and, even, of the associated category of young adult fiction. Some of the texts she discusses were not published as youth fiction at all: for example, the writing of the Nyoongah (Western Australian) Glenys Ward, When You Grow Up (1996) by Connie McDonald, or the novel Lori (1989) by John Wilson, all published by Magabala Books, as well as perhaps Phillip Gwynne's Nukkin Ya (2000). In sometimes moving beyond texts directed towards a youth readership and substantially about youth (if this might be one working definition of children's literature) to include texts that she considers "easily accessible to adolescent readers," Bradford gives her argument a richer field over which to play (73). Given this, and if she is aiming at a comprehensive picture of past practices, there are some odd omissions. These include two ("adult fiction") texts that have had great currency on secondary school syllabi: Katharine Susannah Prichard's Coonardoo (1929), long lauded as the first novel to draw a (comparatively) full and credible Aboriginal woman and, more recently, the Koori (South Eastern Australian), and Ruby Langford Ginibi's Don't Take Your Love to Town (1988), an example of Aboriginal autobiographical fiction which, particularly by women, has been a prominent genre in Australian publishing since the 1960s. Bradford's book has a central interest in methodological and political issues, but there are some that might have been engaged with more depth. While able to observe an "internalization of discourses that construct Aborigines as children," Bradford doesn't grapple with the issue of how, for example, self-censorship in much Aboriginal autobiography such as Ward's might make it ostensibly readable by youth (153). Ginibi's Don't Take was innovative in refusing a respectable...

Cultural Change and Gender Identity Trends in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract As in most capitalist countries, the advent of the “consumer society” has brought about radical cultural change in Japanese society. In this paper I aim to illustrate the undercurrents of this change, focusing on the transformation of social consciousness and gender identity as it is reflected in the popular and youth cultures. In order to show these changes, I have sellected several bestsellers from youth fictions (sekhun‐shousetsu) as my main object of study and have presented several diagrams to illustrate the apparent relationship between this type of fictions and the so‐called “aprgs‐guerre” generation, the “gang of sun,” the “baby‐boomers,” the “moratorium generation,” the “mutant generation.” While analyzing the historical trend of youth fiction for the last 45 years and refering to the other types of popular culture (films, popular songs, comics etc.), I shall attempt to throw light upon the substance of these changes and predict what directions the Japanese culture is likely to take in the future.

A Bully Bunch of Books: Boy Scout Series Books in American Youth Fiction, 1910-1930

A Bully Bunch of Books:Boy Scout Series Books in American Youth Fiction, 1910-1930 M. Paul Holsinger (bio) During the first three decades of this century, hundreds of juvenile series books, often of the ten- to fifty-cent variety, poured off publishers' presses to fuel the almost insatiable reading appetites of America's young boys. Indeed, so many series were written that it was often difficult to keep them all straight. There were Airship Boys, Aeroplane Boys, and Air Service Boys. There were Motor Boat Boys, Motor Boat Club Boys, Motorcycle Chums, Motor Cycle Chums, and Motor Rangers. There were also Boy Aviators, Boy Chums, Boy Hunters, Boy Fortune Rangers, Boy Troopers, and Boy Volunteers. Despite this plethora of series stories, however, no one group, fiction or non-fictional, so dominated the field of juvenile writing as did the Boy Scouts of America. Almost from the very moment of the chartering of the national B. S. A. in 1910, publishers, especially those specializing in cheap children's fiction, sensed a ready market for sales. Soon new books ostensibly featuring Scouting heroes began to appear at a dizzying rate. More than one hundred full-length novels dealing with the Boy Scouts were pubished between 1911 and 1914; well over three hundred different books had appeared in print by the advent of the Great Depression.1 As might be expected, much of the earliest literature that appeared on dealers' shelves was little better than the worse pulp fiction. Like the already ubiquitous Stratemeyer Syndicate's "Tom Swift," most of the boys depicted in the Boy Scout novels of the day were fantastic superheroes who were larger than life itself as they took on spies, enemy agents, thugs and murderers of all kinds, and, with relative ease, overcame them all in the name of Scouting and the American Way. Easily the most productive author of the genre was "Scoutmaster" G. Harvey Ralphson. From 1911 to 1916, Ralphson, writing under his own name and as "Major Archibald Lee Fletcher," authored thirty-two full-length Boy Scout novels, all published by M. A. Donohue and Company, one of America's largest publishers of cheap, juvenile fiction. Though Ralphson ceased writing about Scouting after 1917 and, instead, turned his attentions to the excitement of the First World War in a five-volume series of "Over There" stories, his many Boy Scout novels continued to be reprinted by the thousands throughout the 1920s. The plots of most of the Ralphson volumes were ludicrously unbelievable except perhaps to the most gullible of adolescent readers. In the twenty volumes published under his own name, the author created a group of Boy Scouts from two separate New York City patrols. These young men, each of whom was between thirteen and seventeen years of age throughout all the volumes in the series, never go to school or work for a living. At the proverbial drop of a hat, however, five or six of them are able to take off to some exotic part of the world so they can work for the United States Secret Service. Frequently baffled by one international crisis or another, government officials called on the Bear and Wolf Patrols for help, and, as might be expected of ultra-patriotic young men, the country was saved over and over again, thanks to the bravery and ingenuity of the Boy Scouts of America. The natural leader of the Ralphson-invented Boy Scouts was Ned Nestor, "a sturdy lad, tall and heavy for his [seventeen] years, with brown hair and eyes and a complexion like that of a young girl" (Beyond the Arctic Circle 4). All the other boys looked up to Ned, but then so did everyone else in the nation because, besides being a Boy Scout, Ned was also America's premier detective. Ned was joined in his adventures by a group of boys so untypical of the youth of the early twentieth century that it is hard to understand how most of the volumes' readers could have related to any of them. Ned's sidekick and best friend was the irrepressible Jimmie McGraw, a former Bowery [End Page 178] newsboy in the best Horatio Alger tradition...