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"Young adult fiction, American History and criticism."
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Melancholia and maturation : the use of trauma in American children's literature
\"Coming of age\" in children's fiction often means achieving maturity through the experience of trauma. In classics ranging from Old Yeller to The Outsiders, a narrative of psychological pain defies expectations of childhood as a time of innocence and play. In this provocative new book, Eric L. Tribunella explores why trauma, especially the loss of a loved object, occurs in some of the most popular and critically acclaimed twentieth-century American fiction for children.
Tribunella draws on queer theory and feminist revisions of Freud's notion of melancholia, which is described as a fundamental response to loss, arguing that the low-grade symptoms of melancholia are in fact what characterize the mature, sober, and responsible American adult. Melancholia and Maturation looks at how this effect is achieved in a society that purports to protect youngsters from every possible source of danger, thus requiring melancholia to be induced artificially.
Each of the book's five chapters focuses on a different kind of lost object sacrificed so as to propel the child toward a distinctively gendered, sexual, ethical, and national adulthood-from same-sex friends to the companionship of boy-and-his-dog stories, from the lost ideals of historical fiction about the American Revolution to the children killed or traumatized in Holocaust novels. The author examines a wide spectrum of works-including Jack London's dog tales, the contemporary \"realistic\" novels of S. E. Hinton, and Newbery Medal winners like Johnny Tremain and Bridge to Terabithia.
Tribunella raises fundamental questions about the value of children's literature as a whole and provides context for understanding why certain books become required reading for youth.
Eric L. Tribunella is assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His articles have been published in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Children's Literature in Education, The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children's Literature, and Children's Literature.
eBook
Freud in Oz
Children’s literature has spent decades on the psychiatrist’s couch, submitting to psychoanalysis by scores of scholars and popular writers. Freud in Oz suggests that psychoanalysts owe a significant and largely unacknowledged debt to books ostensibly written for children. Kenneth B. Kidd argues that children’s literature and psychoanalysis have influenced and interacted with each other since Freud published his first case studies.
eBook
Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults
Winner of the Children's Literature Association Edited Book Award
From the jaded, wired teenagers of M.T. Anderson's Feed to the spirited young rebels of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy, the protagonists of Young Adult dystopias are introducing a new generation of readers to the pleasures and challenges of dystopian imaginings. As the dark universes of YA dystopias continue to flood the market,Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers offers a critical evaluation of the literary and political potentials of this widespread publishing phenomenon. With its capacity to frighten and warn, dystopian writing powerfully engages with our pressing global concerns: liberty and self-determination, environmental destruction and looming catastrophe, questions of identity and justice, and the increasingly fragile boundaries between technology and the self. When directed at young readers, these dystopian warnings are distilled into exciting adventures with gripping plots and accessible messages that may have the potential to motivate a generation on the cusp of adulthood. This collection enacts a lively debate about the goals and efficacy of YA dystopias, with three major areas of contention: do these texts reinscribe an old didacticism or offer an exciting new frontier in children's literature? Do their political critiques represent conservative or radical ideologies? And finally, are these novels high-minded attempts to educate the young or simply bids to cash in on a formula for commercial success? This collection represents a prismatic and evolving understanding of the genre, illuminating its relevance to children's literature and our wider culture.
eBook
Bringing Light to Twilight : Perspectives on a Pop Culture Phenomenon
\"Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series has met with astonishing commercial success--not just amongst adolescent girls, but with college students, middle-aged women, and writers and publishers who hope to capitalize on the author's achievements by tapping into a primed market. For all of these reasons, it becomes a vital enterprise to investigate the themes of the Twilight books and the ways they encourage readers to perceive and interact with the world around them. The essays in this collection approach Meyer's novels from diverse perspectives, and will be of interest to academic and lay readers alike: undergraduates and graduate students; instructors of young adult literature, contemporary U.S. writing, the Gothic, and popular culture; the myriad Twilight fans who seek to explore and re-explore the novels from a variety of angles\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Writing youth
Writing Youth: Young Adult Fiction as Literacy Sponsorship studies young adult (YA) fiction that analyzes corporate sponsorship of media literacy practices in and through YA fiction. It shows how YA novels model for young people ways to manage the various media tools that surround them.
eBook
Twenty-first-century feminisms in children's and adolescent literature
\"Over twenty years after the publication of her groundbreaking work, Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels, Roberta Seelinger Trites returns to analyze how literature for the young still provides one outlet in which feminists can offer girls an alternative to sexism. Supplementing her previous work in the linguistic turn, Trites employs methodologies from the material turn to demonstrate how feminist thinking has influenced literature for the young in the last two decades. She interrogates how material feminism can expand our understanding of maturation and gender--especially girlhood--as represented in narratives for preadolescents and adolescents. Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children's and Adolescent Literature applies principles behind material feminisms, such as ecofeminism, intersectionality, and the ethics of care, to analyze important feminist thinking that permeates twenty-first-century publishing for youth. The structure moves from examinations of the individual to examinations of the individual in social, environmental, and interpersonal contexts. The book deploys ecofeminism and the posthuman to investigate how embodied individuals interact with the environment and via the extension of feministic ethics how people interact with each other romantically and sexually. Throughout the book, Trites explores issues of identity, gender, race, class, age, and sexuality in a wide range of literature for young readers, such as Kate DiCamillo's Flora and Ulysses, Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming, and Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park. She demonstrates how shifting cultural perceptions of feminism affect what is happening both in publishing for the young and in the academic study of literature for children and adolescents.\"-- Provided by publisher.
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