Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction

Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction PDF Author: Meghan Gilbert-Hickey
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496833856
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Contributions by Malin Alkestrand, Joshua Yu Burnett, Sean P. Connors, Jill Coste, Meghan Gilbert-Hickey, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Sierra Hale, Kathryn Strong Hansen, Elizabeth Ho, Esther L. Jones, Sarah Olutola, Alex Polish, Zara Rix, Susan Tan, and Roberta Seelinger Trites Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction offers a sustained analysis of race and representation in young adult speculative fiction (YASF). The collection considers how characters of color are represented in YASF, how they contribute to and participate in speculative worlds, how race affects or influences the structures of speculative worlds, and how race and racial ideologies are implicated in YASF. This collection also examines how race and racism are discussed in YASF or if, indeed, race and racism are discussed at all. Essays explore such notable and popular works as the Divergent series, The Red Queen, The Lunar Chronicles, and the Infernal Devices trilogy. They consider the effects of colorblind ideology and postracialism on YASF, a genre that is often seen as progressive in its representation of adolescent protagonists. Simply put, colorblindness silences those who believe—and whose experiences demonstrate—that race and racism do continue to matter. In examining how some YASF texts normalize many of our social structures and hierarchies, this collection examines how race and racism are represented in the genre and considers how hierarchies of race are reinscribed in some texts and transgressed in others. Contributors point toward the potential of YASF to address and interrogate racial inequities in the contemporary West and beyond. They critique texts that fall short of this possibility, and they articulate ways in which readers and critics alike might nonetheless locate diversity within narratives. This is a collection troubled by the lingering emphasis on colorblindness in YASF, but it is also the work of scholars who love the genre and celebrate its progress toward inclusivity, and who further see in it an enduring future for intersectional identity.

Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction

Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction PDF Author: Meghan Gilbert-Hickey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781496833815
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
A wrestling with the faults and possibilities of the portrayals of race in this powerful genre

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

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.

The Dark Fantastic

The Dark Fantastic PDF Author: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479806072
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Book Description
Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”

Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction

Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction PDF Author: Marek C. Oziewicz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317610814
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
This book is the first to offer a justice-focused cognitive reading of modern YA speculative fiction in its narrative and filmic forms. It links the expansion of YA speculative fiction in the 20th century with the emergence of human and civil rights movements, with the communitarian revolution in conceptualizations of justice, and with spectacular advances in cognitive sciences as applied to the examination of narrative fiction. Oziewicz argues that complex ideas such as justice are processed by the human mind as cognitive scripts; that scripts, when narrated, take the form of multiply indexable stories; and that YA speculative fiction is currently the largest conceptual testing ground in the forging of justice consciousness for the 21st century world. Drawing on recent research in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences, Oziewicz explains how poetic, retributive, restorative, environmental, social, and global types of justice have been represented in narrative fiction, from 19th century folk and fairy tales through 21st century fantasy, dystopia, and science fiction. Suggesting that the appeal of these and other nonmimetic genres is largely predicated on the dream of justice, Oziewicz theorizes new justice scripts as conceptual tools essential to help humanity survive the qualitative leap toward an environmentally conscious, culturally diversified global world. This book is an important contribution to studies of children’s and YA speculative fiction, adding a new perspective to discussions about the educational as well as social potential of nonmimetic genres. It demonstrates that the justice imperative is very much alive in YA speculative fiction, creating new visions of justice relevant to contemporary challenges.

Containing Childhood

Containing Childhood PDF Author: Danielle Russell
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496841190
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Book Description
Contributions by Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Kathleen Kellett, Andrew McInnes, Joyce McPherson, Rebecca Mills, Cristina Rivera, Wendy Rountree, Danielle Russell, Anah-Jayne Samuelson, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Andrew Trevarrow, and Richardine Woodall Home. School. Nature. The spaces children occupy, both physically and imaginatively, are never neutral. Instead, they carry social, cultural, and political histories that impose—or attempt to impose—behavioral expectations. Moreover, the spaces identified with childhood reflect and reveal adult expectations of where children “belong.” The essays in Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children’s Literature explore the multifaceted and dynamic nature of space, as well as the relationship between space and identity in children’s literature. Contributors to the volume address such questions as: What is the nature of that relationship? What happens to the spaces associated with childhood over time? How do children conceptualize and lay claim to their own spaces? The book features essays on popular and lesser-known children’s fiction from North America and Great Britain, including works like The Hate U Give, His Dark Materials, The Giver quartet, and Shadowshaper. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach in their analysis, contributors draw upon varied scholarly areas such as philosophy, race, class, and gender studies, among others. Without reducing the issues to any singular theory or perspective, each piece provides insight into specific treatments of space in specific periods of time, thereby affording scholars a greater appreciation of the diverse spatial patterns in children’s literature.

Young Adult Science Fiction

Young Adult Science Fiction PDF Author: C. W. Sullivan III
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313371180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
At the close of the nineteenth century, American youths developed a growing interest in electricity and its applications, machines, and gadgetry. When authors and publishers recognized the extent of this interest in technology, they sought to create reading materials that would meet this market need. The result was science fiction written especially for young adults. While critics tended to neglect young adult science fiction for decades, they gradually came to recognize its practical and cultural value. Science fiction inspired many young adults to study science and engineering and helped foster technological innovation. At the same time, these works also explored cultural and social concerns more commonly associated with serious literature. Nor was young adult science fiction a peculiarly American phenomenon: authors in other countries likewise wrote science fiction for young adult readers. This book examines young adult science fiction in the U.S. and several other countries and explores issues central to the genre. The first part of the book treats the larger contexts of young adult science fiction and includes chapters on its history and development. Included are discussions of science fiction for young adults in the U.S. and in Canada, Great Britain, Germany, and Australia. These chapters are written by expert contributors and chart the history of young adult science fiction from the nineteenth century to the present. The second section of the book considers topics of special interest to young adult science fiction. Some of the chapters look at particular forms and expressions of science fiction, such as films and comic books. Others treat particular topics, such as the portrayal of women in Robert Heinlein's works and representations of war in young adult science fiction. Yet another chapter studies the young adult science fiction novel as a coming-of-age story and thus helps distinguish the genre from science fiction written for adult readers. All chapters reflect current research, and the volume concludes with extensive bibliographies.

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media PDF Author: Nizar Zouidi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030760553
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 534

Book Description
Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media studies the performative nature of evil characters, acts and emotions across intersecting genres, disciplines and historical eras. This collection brings together scholars and artists with different institutional standings, cultural backgrounds and (inter)disciplinary interests with the aim of energizing the ongoing discussion of the generic and thematic issues related to the representation of villainy and evil in literature and media. The volume covers medieval literature to contemporary literature and also examines important aspects of evil in literature such as social and political identity, the gothic and systemic evil practices. In addition to literature, the book considers examples of villainy in film, TV and media, revealing that performance, performative control and maneuverability are the common characteristics of villains across the different literary and filmic genres and eras studied in the volume.

Teaching Black Speculative Fiction

Teaching Black Speculative Fiction PDF Author: KaaVonia Hinton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003859941
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
Teaching Black Speculative Fiction: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism edited by KaaVonia Hinton and Karen Michele Chandler offers innovative approaches to teaching Black speculative fiction (e.g., science fiction, fantasy, horror) in ways that will inspire middle and high school students to think, talk, and write about issues of equity, justice, and antiracism. The book highlights texts by seminal authors such as Octavia E. Butler and influential and emerging authors, including Nnedi Okorafor, Kacen Callender, B. B. Alston, Tomi Adeyemi, and Bethany C. Morrow. Each chapter in Teaching Black Speculative Fiction: introduces a Black speculative text and its author, describes how the text engages with issues of equity, justice, and/or antiracism, explains and describes how one theory or approach helps elucidate the key text’s concern with equity, justice, and/or antiracism, and offers engaging teaching activities that encourage students to read the focal text; that facilitate exploration of the text and a theoretical lens or critical approach; and that guide students to consider ways to extend the focus on equity, justice, and/or antiracism to action in their own lives and communities.

Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts

Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts PDF Author: Douglas Fisher
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003817912
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 535

Book Description
Now in its fifth edition, the Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts--sponsored by the International Literacy Association and the National Council of Teachers of English--remains at the forefront in bringing together prominent scholars, researchers, and professional leaders to offer an integrated perspective on teaching the English language arts and a comprehensive overview of research in the field. Reflecting important developments since the publication of the fourth edition in 2017, this new edition is streamlined and completely restructured around "big ideas" in the field related to theoretical and research foundations, learners in context, and new literacies. Addressing all the language arts within a holistic perspective (speaking/listening, viewing, language, writing, reading), it covers new and important topics, such as online learning, multimodalities, culturally responsive learning, and more.