Actors and Aliens: Representations of Teenage Protagonists in Bestselling YA Fiction

<p>This project explores the representation of teenagers in some of the most popular Young Adult Fiction (YA) books of the early 2010s. A dominant assumption within the scholarly discussion of YA is that YA books are books for young people that feature protagonists with whom young people personally identify. Through an analysis of nine American YA books, this thesis offers an overview of the sorts of protagonists often found in the novels on New Zealand’s YA bestseller lists. Reporting results from a questionnaire and one-on-one interviews conducted with young YA readers, it explores whether or not this model of being a teenager is one with which young people do actually identify. Using Erving Goffman’s 1959 theory of impression management as a lens, this thesis explores how the protagonists of the selected novels see their world as a stage upon which they are expected to act out socially acceptable roles. While female protagonists use strategies to meet this pressure and emerge as competent social actors, male protagonists find themselves governed by forces beyond their control that render them social aliens. Whereas female protagonists face negative consequences for being themselves, male protagonists are rewarded for doing so. Regardless of their acting ability, all protagonists are represented as confused, insecure and troubled. The selected texts thus support stereotypes about teenage girls, teenage boys and young people in general that differ from those of the past but are ultimately no less problematic. The participants in this project’s small mixed-methods study shared this view of the protagonists but did not generally identify with them. While they enjoyed reading these books, this was not necessarily because of the protagonists, for whom they felt more concern than empathy. Rather than reflecting any kind of ‘truth’ about what it means to be a teenager, it seems that the protagonists of the selected texts reflect how adult authors, editors and booksellers imagine teenagers to be. This is a significant finding given the rising numbers of adults who are reading YA and the declining numbers of teenagers who are reading for pleasure.</p>

Actors and Aliens: Representations of Teenage Protagonists in Bestselling YA Fiction

<p>This project explores the representation of teenagers in some of the most popular Young Adult Fiction (YA) books of the early 2010s. A dominant assumption within the scholarly discussion of YA is that YA books are books for young people that feature protagonists with whom young people personally identify. Through an analysis of nine American YA books, this thesis offers an overview of the sorts of protagonists often found in the novels on New Zealand’s YA bestseller lists. Reporting results from a questionnaire and one-on-one interviews conducted with young YA readers, it explores whether or not this model of being a teenager is one with which young people do actually identify. Using Erving Goffman’s 1959 theory of impression management as a lens, this thesis explores how the protagonists of the selected novels see their world as a stage upon which they are expected to act out socially acceptable roles. While female protagonists use strategies to meet this pressure and emerge as competent social actors, male protagonists find themselves governed by forces beyond their control that render them social aliens. Whereas female protagonists face negative consequences for being themselves, male protagonists are rewarded for doing so. Regardless of their acting ability, all protagonists are represented as confused, insecure and troubled. The selected texts thus support stereotypes about teenage girls, teenage boys and young people in general that differ from those of the past but are ultimately no less problematic. The participants in this project’s small mixed-methods study shared this view of the protagonists but did not generally identify with them. While they enjoyed reading these books, this was not necessarily because of the protagonists, for whom they felt more concern than empathy. Rather than reflecting any kind of ‘truth’ about what it means to be a teenager, it seems that the protagonists of the selected texts reflect how adult authors, editors and booksellers imagine teenagers to be. This is a significant finding given the rising numbers of adults who are reading YA and the declining numbers of teenagers who are reading for pleasure.</p>

Pakistani Anglophone Young Adult Fiction and the Art of Commodification of Culture: An Insight to Sheba Karim’s The Skunk Girl and Rukhsana Khan’s Wanting Mor

This article aims to explore the art of commodification of culture deployed in the Pakistani Anglophone Young Adult (YA) fiction with special reference to Sheba Karim’s The Skunk Girl (2009) and Rukhsana Khan Wanting Mor (2010). It has been contextualized in the postulates of the commodification of culture highlighted by Nederveen Pieterse in his work Globalisation and Culture: The three Paradigms. The term commodification has gained immense popularity in the contemporary era of globalization partly because of free trade and the economy. Culture in principle is one of the essential standpoints of globalization owing to its subtlest but the most penetrating tentacle in general and its capability to commodify in particular. Having a base in the economy, culture has been systematically commodified as a heterogeneous, homogeneous, or hybrid form to be sold either physically in galleries, museums, and tourist spots. The literature by South Asian writers has been altered to present the cultural illustration as hybrid, heterogeneous, or homogenized. Which according to Pieterse is the form of commodification of culture. It is this aspect that the present article intends to explore to assert that the success of YA Fiction is undoubtedly owed to aesthetic and academic merits but mainly due to the successful deployment of the technique of commodification of culture. Keywords: Culture Commodification, Heterogeneous, Homogeneous, Hybrid, YA Fiction

Ghosts, murder and mutation: The portrayal of pandemics in children’s and YA fiction

The coronavirus pandemic has stimulated a number of texts, which are aimed at helping children to cope with situations alien to them. For example, the picture book Staying Home by Sally Nichols and Vivienne Schwarz (2020) deals with the conditions of lockdown and family isolation, whilst Piperpotamus by Annis Watts endeavours to explain COVID-19. This pandemic is not the only such event in history. The Black Death swept across Europe (1347–51) followed by the Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20). Both of these have stimulated historical fiction for older children and Young Adults and have done so by employing differing literary approaches. For instance, Cat Winters’ In the Shadow of Blackbirds (2013) incorporates a ghost story set against the contexts of séances and spirit photographers as the bereaved hope to gain comfort, whilst Charles Todd’s An Unmarked Grave (2012) is a murder mystery. Dystopian science fiction has also been employed to examine the equivalent circumstances of such pandemics. The plague in Gone (2008–14) by Michael Grant follows a nuclear disaster, which has produced a world where only those under fifteen have survived beneath a dome created by a young autistic child at the point of the explosion. Unforeseen forces have erupted resulting in mutation where individuals have supernatural powers taking them into a posthuman state. Their world is later blighted by plague and the children have to deal with remaking their lives and their society without the help of adults. This article will consider the various ways that such texts have approached these world-changing disasters and the common themes, which emerge to give our current generation of children ways of thinking about their present and their future.

The Paratextual Labeling of Autistic-Authored YA Fiction as #OwnVoices: How YA Literary Culture Creates Space for Neurodivergent Authorship

This essay considers the effect of #OwnVoices on autistic literary representation by analyzing how autistic authors use paratexts to prescribe for some readers ways of understanding autistic-authored texts while temporarily refraining from prescribing a particular method for others, allowing readers with opposing ideologies to first read the narrative before they encounter the more didactic elements of the text. Building on Gerrard Genette's theorization of the paratext, this essay compares the use of text and paratext in two works of autistic-authored fiction, Corinne Duyvis's On the Edge of Gone and Jen Wilde's Queens of Geek, to that of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a work of allistic-authored YA fiction. The contrast between these two kinds of texts reveals how #ownvoices texts foreground the positionality of the author in ways that enable rather than foreclose discussions about the ethical representation of autistic people.

Feminist Activism against Rape Culture

I met Roxanne Harde, the guest editor of this Special Issue, at the Second International Girls Studies Association conference in 2019 when I attended the panel discussion, “Representations of Rape in Young Adult Fiction.” I recall Roxanne’s passion vividly and, indeed, the enthusiasm of all three presenters as they discussed a variety of texts in superb presentations that aligned well with Ann Smith’s notion of feminism in action in their seeing “a fictional text not only as a literary investigation into issues of concern to its author but also as the site of educational research” (2000: 245). Their papers pointed to the ways in which the analysis of how rape culture is treated in Young Adult (YA) literature, film, and the print media can take scholars and activists so much further into the issues, and, at the same time, noted the ways in which rape culture in all its manifestations as a global phenomenon has inevitably led to its becoming an everyday topic of YA fiction.