Contemporary Girlhood and Anne Boleyn in Young Adult Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Russo
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Teenage Girls ◽  
Feminist Agency

Anne Boleyn has been narrativized in Young Adult (YA) historical fiction since the nineteenth century. Since the popular Showtime series The Tudors (2007–2010) aired, teenage girls have shown increased interest in the story of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second and most infamous queen. This construction of Boleyn suggests that she was both celebrated and punished for her proto-feminist agency and forthright sexuality. A new subgenre of Boleyn historical fiction has also recently emerged—YA novels in which her story is rewritten as a contemporary high school drama. In this article, I consider several YA novels about Anne Boleyn in order to explore the relevance to contemporary teenage girls of a woman who lived and died 500 years ago.

scholarly journals Ragged Fortunes and Swashbuckling Thrillers; Or, Recreating the Victorian in Young Adult Fiction 1985-2011

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Maria Lujan Herrera
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
World View ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Upheaval

<p>The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical” fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics. After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London, prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own world view. Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies, they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo disturbingly through the centuries.</p>

scholarly journals Ragged Fortunes and Swashbuckling Thrillers; Or, Recreating the Victorian in Young Adult Fiction 1985-2011

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Maria Lujan Herrera
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
World View ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Upheaval

<p>The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical” fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics. After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London, prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own world view. Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies, they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo disturbingly through the centuries.</p>

scholarly journals Herstory in Young Adult Fiction by Joanna Rudniańska Based on the Examples of „Rok Smoka” and „Kotka Brygidy”

2019 ◽  
pp. 301-325
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Slany
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Teenage Girls ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The World ◽  
Detailed Interpretation

The paper discusses young adult fiction by Joanna Rudniańska, whose works belong to the stream of non-conformist coming-of-age novels marked by experiences of exclusively teenage girls/women, developing in Poland since the 1990s. Both Rok Smoka and Kotka Brygidy emphasise the personal quality of teenage girls and women, and present their fates with a particular consideration of their fairly individualised processes of maturation and intentional development of their identities. The author of this paper employs feminist methodologies to emphasise the ambivalent, borderline, and negative female experiences in the analysed texts. She offers a detailed interpretation of how the protagonists of the above-mentioned novels experience the world; she applies a metaphorical and fantastic perspective of telling herstories, while searching for matrilineal traces, the phenomenon of sisterhood, drastic rituals inscribed in the feminine domain, and the special kind of coming-of-age which constitutes the starting point for personal and subjective herstories.

Creating a ‘Masala’ Self: Bicultural Identity in Desi Young Adult Novels

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Superle
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Young People ◽  
Identity Development ◽  
Small Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Bicultural Identity ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Institutional Forces ◽  
Cultural Identity Development

In the past two decades, the previously silent voices of diasporic Indian writers for young people have emerged, and a small body of texts has begun to develop in the United States and the United Kingdom. One of the major preoccupations of these texts is cultural identity development, especially in the novels published for a young adult audience, which often feature protagonists in the throes of an identity crisis. For example, the novels The Roller Birds of Rampur (1991) by Indi Rana, Born Confused (2002) by Tanuja Desai Hidier, and The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen (2005) by Mitali Perkins all focus on an adolescent girl coping with her bicultural identity with angst and confusion, and delineate the ways her self-concept and relationships are affected. The texts are empowering in their suggestion that young people have the agency to explore and create their own balanced bicultural identities, but like other young adult fiction, they ultimately situate adolescents within insurmountable institutional forces that are much more powerful than any individual.

The Late-Victorian ‘New Man’ and the Neo-Victorian ‘Neo-Man’

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
New Man ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Victorian Age

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.

Developing UK and Norwegian undergraduate students’ conceptions of personal social issues in young adult fiction through transnational reflective exchange

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Ghazal Kazim Syed ◽  
Amanda Naylor ◽  
Hege Emma Rimmereide ◽  
Zoltan Varga ◽  
Lykke Harmony Alara Guanio-Uluru
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Young Adult Fiction
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