Understanding (Post)feminist Girlhood Through Young Adult Fantasy Literature

Understanding (Post)feminist Girlhood Through Young Adult Fantasy Literature PDF Author: Elizabeth Little
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040216749
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Understanding (Post)feminist Girlhood Through Young Adult Fantasy Literature takes advantage of growing critical interest in popular young adult texts and their influence on young people. The monograph offers an innovative approach by pairing traditional literary analysis with the responses of readers to show the complex ways that young people respond to the depiction of female protagonists. In the first section, the book utilises a feminist framework to examine young adult fantasy novels published from 2012 to 2018, with a particular focus on A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas, 2015) and Red Queen (Aveyard, 2015). The analysis shows how strong female protagonists in young adult fantasy are postfeminist heroines who reinscribe patriarchal power structures, embrace limited understandings of gender roles, and persist in relationships that oppress them. In the second section, the monograph introduces empirical data from a series of focus groups discussing those same novels. The discussion shows that readers respond to these popular young adult fantasy texts with complexity and nuance that highlights their postfeminist subjectivities as they simultaneously reject and reinscribe elements of postfeminism in their understanding of the girl protagonists.

Understanding (Post)feminist Girlhood Through Young Adult Fantasy Literature

Understanding (Post)feminist Girlhood Through Young Adult Fantasy Literature PDF Author: Elizabeth Little
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040216749
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Get Book Here

Book Description
Understanding (Post)feminist Girlhood Through Young Adult Fantasy Literature takes advantage of growing critical interest in popular young adult texts and their influence on young people. The monograph offers an innovative approach by pairing traditional literary analysis with the responses of readers to show the complex ways that young people respond to the depiction of female protagonists. In the first section, the book utilises a feminist framework to examine young adult fantasy novels published from 2012 to 2018, with a particular focus on A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas, 2015) and Red Queen (Aveyard, 2015). The analysis shows how strong female protagonists in young adult fantasy are postfeminist heroines who reinscribe patriarchal power structures, embrace limited understandings of gender roles, and persist in relationships that oppress them. In the second section, the monograph introduces empirical data from a series of focus groups discussing those same novels. The discussion shows that readers respond to these popular young adult fantasy texts with complexity and nuance that highlights their postfeminist subjectivities as they simultaneously reject and reinscribe elements of postfeminism in their understanding of the girl protagonists.

Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults

Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults PDF Author: Paul Venzo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000393496
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Expanding outward from previous scholarship on gender, queerness, and heteronormativity in children’s literature, this book offers fresh insights into representations of sex and sexuality in texts for young people. In this collection, new and established scholars examine how fiction and non-fiction writing, picture books, film and television and graphic novels position young people in relation to ideologies around sexuality, sexual identity, and embodiment. This book questions how such texts communicate a sense of what is possible, impossible, taboo, or encouraged in terms of being sexual and sexual being. Each chapter is motivated by a set of important questions: How are representations of sex and sexuality depicted in texts for young people? How do these representations affect and shape the kinds of sexualities offered as models to young readers? And to what extent is sexual diversity acknowledged and represented across different narrative and aesthetic modes? This work brings together a diverse range of conceptual and theoretical approaches that are framed by the idea of sexual becoming: the manner in which texts for young people invite their readers to assess and potentially adopt ways of thinking and being in terms of sex and sexuality.

Teaching Young Adult Literature

Teaching Young Adult Literature PDF Author: Mike Cadden
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603294562
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Thanks to the success of franchises such as The Hunger Games and Twilight, young adult literature has reached a new level of prominence and popularity. Teens and adults alike are drawn to the genre's coming-of-age themes, fast pacing, and vivid emotional portrayals. The essays in this volume suggest ways high school and college instructors can incorporate YA texts into courses in literature, education, library science, and general education. The first group of essays explores key issues in YA literature, situates works in cultural contexts, and addresses questions of text selection and censorship. The second section discusses a range of genres within YA literature, including both realistic and speculative fiction as well as verse narratives, comics, and film. The final section offers ideas for assignments, including interdisciplinary and digital projects, in a variety of courses.

Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction

Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction PDF Author: Leah Phillips
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350119326
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The heroic romance is one of the West's most enduring narratives, found everywhere, from religion and myth to blockbuster films and young adult literature. Within this story, adolescent girls are not, and cannot be, the heroes. They are, at best, the hero's bride, a prize he wins for slaying monsters. Crucially, although the girl's exclusion from heroic selfhood affects all girls, it does not do so equally- whiteness and able-bodiedness are taken as markers of heightened, fantasy femininity. Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction explores how the young female-heroes of mythopoeic YA, a Tolkienian-inspired genre drawing on myth's world-creating power and YA's liminal potential, disrupt the conventional heroic narrative. These heroes, such as Tamora Pierce's Alanna the Lioness, Daine the Wildmage, and Marissa Meyer's Cinder and Iko, offer a model of being-hero, an embodied way of living and being in this world that disrupts the typical hero's violent hierarchy, isolating individuality, and erasure of difference. In doing so, they push the boundaries of what it means to be a hero, a girl, and even human.

Gender(ed) Identities

Gender(ed) Identities PDF Author: Tricia Clasen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317430700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This volume brings together diverse, cross-disciplinary scholarly voices to examine gender construction in children's and young adult literature. It complements and updates the scholarship in the field by creating a rich, cohesive examination of core questions around gender and sexuality in classic and contemporary texts. By providing an expansive treatment of gender and sexuality across genres, eras, and national literature, the collection explores how readers encounter unorthodox as well as traditional notions of gender. It begins with essays exploring how children's and YA literature construct communities formed by gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and in face-to-face and virtual spaces. Section II's central focus is how gendered identities are formed, unpacking how texts for young readers ranging from Amish youth periodicals to the blockbuster Divergent series trace, reproduce, and shape gendered identity socialization. In section III, the essential literary function of translating trauma into narrative is addressed in classics like Anne of Green Gables and Pollyanna, as well as more recent works. Section IV's focus on sexuality and romance encompasses fiction and nonfiction works, examining how children's and young adult literature can serve as a regressive, progressive, and transgressive site for construction meaning about sex and romance. Last, Section IV offers new readings of paratextual features in literature for children -- from the classic tale of Cinderella to contemporary illustrated novels. The key achievement of this volume is providing an updated range of multidisciplinary and methodologically diverse analyses of critically and commercially successful texts, contributing to the scholarship on children's and YA literature; gender, sexuality, and women's studies; and a range of other disciplines.

Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies

Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies PDF Author: Ariane M. Balizet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351372033
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
A modern-day Taming of the Shrew that concludes at a high school prom. An agoraphobic Olivia from Twelfth Night sending video dispatches from her bedroom. A time-traveling teenager finding romance in the house of Capulet. Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies posits that Shakespeare in popular culture is increasingly becoming the domain of the adolescent girl, and engages the interdisciplinary field of Girls’ Studies to analyze adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare’s plays in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Through chapters on film, television, young adult fiction, and web series aimed at girl readers and audiences, this volume explores the impact of girl cultures and concerns on Shakespeare’s afterlife in popular culture and the classroom. Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies argues that girls hold a central place in Shakespearean adaptation, and that studying Shakespeare through the lens of contemporary girlhoods can generate new approaches to Renaissance literature as well as popular culture aimed at girls and young people of marginalized genders. Drawing on contemporary cultural discourses ranging from Abstinence-Only Sex Education and Shakespeare in the US Common Core to rape culture and coming out, this book addresses the overlap between Shakespeare’s timeless girl heroines and modern popular cultures that embrace figures like Juliet and Ophelia to understand and validate the experiences of girls. Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies theorizes Shakespeare’s past and present cultural authority as part of an intersectional approach to adaptation in popular culture.

Feminist Afterlives of the Witch

Feminist Afterlives of the Witch PDF Author: Brydie Kosmina
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031252926
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
The book investigates the witch as a key rhetorical symbol in twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist memory, politics, activism, and popular culture. The witch demonstrates the inheritance of paradoxical pasts, traversing numerous ideological memoryscapes. This book is an examination of the ways that the witch has been deployed by feminist activists and writers in their political efforts in the twentieth century, and how this has indelibly affected cultural memories of the witch and the witch trials, and how this plays out in popular culture representations of the symbol through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Consequently, this book considers the relationship between popular culture and media, activist politics, and cultural memory. Using hauntological theories of memory and temporality, and literary, screen, and cultural studies methodologies, this book considers how popular culture remembers, misremembers, and forgets usable pasts, and the uses (and misuses) of these memories for feminist politics. Given the ubiquity of the witch in popular culture, politics and activism since 2016, this book is a timely examination of the range of meanings inherent to the figure, and is an important study of how cultural symbols like the witch inherit paradoxical memories, histories, and politics. The book will be valuable for scholars across disciplines, including witchcraft studies, feminist philosophy and history, memory studies, and popular culture studies.

Understanding (Post)Feminist Girlhood Through Young Adult Fantasy Literature

Understanding (Post)Feminist Girlhood Through Young Adult Fantasy Literature PDF Author: Elizabeth Little
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032776996
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Understanding (Post)feminist Girlhood Through Young Adult Fantasy Literature takes advantage of growing critical interest in popular young adult texts and their influence on young people. The monograph offers an innovative approach by pairing traditional literary analysis with the responses of readers to show the complex ways that young people respond to the depiction of female protagonists. In the first section the book utilises a feminist framework to examine young adult fantasy novels published from 2012-2018, with a particular focus on A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas 2015) and Red Queen (Aveyard 2015). The analysis shows how strong female protagonists in young adult fantasy are postfeminist heroines who reinscribe patriarchal power structures, embrace limited understandings of gender roles, and persist in relationships that oppress them. In the second section the monograph introduces empirical data from a series of focus groups discussing those same novels. The discussion shows that readers respond to these popular young adult fantasy texts with complexity and nuance that highlights their postfeminist subjectivities as they simultaneously reject and reinscribe elements of postfeminism in their understanding of the girl protagonists.

Melvin Burgess

Melvin Burgess PDF Author: Alison Waller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137262818
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Melvin Burgess has made a powerful name for himself in the world of children's and young adult literature, emerging in the 1990s as the author of over twenty critically acclaimed novels. This collection of original essays by a team of established and new scholars introduces readers to the key debates surrounding Burgess's most challenging work, including controversial young adult novels Junk and Doing It. Covering a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, the volume also presents exciting new readings of some of his less familiar fiction for children, and features an interview with the author.

Pop-feminist Narratives

Pop-feminist Narratives PDF Author: Emily Spiers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198820879
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This volume explores the recent phenomenon of 'pop-feminism' and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany and examines what feminist politics look like in the twenty-first century.