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Queer Retrosexualities
Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return examines the retrospective logic that informs contemporary queer thinking; specifically the narrative return to the 1950s in post-1990s queer and LGBT culture in the United States. The term “Queer Retrosexuality” marks the intersection between retrospective thinking and queerness—to illustrate not only how to “queer” retrospection, but also how retrospection, in some senses can be thought of as always already queer. This book examines the historical possibilities that inform the narrative return to the 1950s in queer cultural and literary productions such as Samuel Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water, Todd Haynes’s Far...
Re-Thinking Agency
The book explores the multi-faceted nature of contemporary reflections on agency, focusing on various discursive practices that shape the posthumanist approach to the relationship between the human and non-human world from a planetary perspective. The chapters delve into critical human-animal studies, examine new non-anthropocentric identity constructs, and offer analyses that reinterpret meanings through semiotic inversions and challenge static cultural patterns. The book concludes with discussions on decolonization practices that aim to liberate agency from oppressive systems, particularly those dominated by imperial phallogocentrism.
No Kids Allowed
Children's literature isn't just for children anymore. This original study explores the varied forms and roles of children's literature—when it's written for adults. What do Adam Mansbach's Go the F**k to Sleep and Barbara Park's MA! There's Nothing to Do Here! have in common? These large-format picture books are decidedly intended for parents rather than children. In No Kids Allowed, Michelle Ann Abate examines a constellation of books that form a paradoxical new genre: children's literature for adults. Distinguishing these books from YA and middle-grade fiction that appeals to adult readers, Abate argues that there is something unique about this phenomenon. Principally defined by its form and audience, children's literature, Abate demonstrates, engages with more than mere nostalgia when recast for grown-up readers. Abate examines how board books, coloring books, bedtime stories, and series detective fiction written and published specifically for adults question the boundaries of genre and challenge the assumption that adulthood and childhood are mutually exclusive.
Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction
This book examines the way young adult readers are constructed in a variety of contemporary young adult fictions, arguing that contemporary young adult novels depict readers as agents. Reading, these novels suggest, is neither an unalloyed good nor a dangerous ploy, but rather an essential, occasionally fraught, by turns escapist and instrumental, deeply pleasurable, and highly contentious activity that has value far beyond the classroom skills or the specific content it conveys. After an introductory chapter that examines the state of reading and young adult fiction today, the book examines novels that depict reading in school, gendered and racialized reading, reading magical and religious books, and reading as a means to developing civic agency. These examinations reveal that books for teens depict teen readers as doers, and suggest that their ability to read deeply, critically, and communally is crucial to the development of adolescent agency.
Animals in Young Adult Fiction
Of the many themes occurring in young adult literature, one that bears more extensive exploration is the adolescent-animal connection. Although substantial critical commentary has addressed children's animal stories and animals in adult fiction, very few studies have been devoted to adolescent-animal encounters. In Animals in Young Adult Fiction, Walter Hogan examines several hundred novels and stories to explore the ways in which animals are represented in these works. In additional to providing an historical survey, Hogan looks at both realistic fiction and speculative works, including fantasy, supernatural, horror, and science fiction. Hogan reviews stories that feature wild animal encounters, stories centered on relationships with horses, dogs, and other working and performing animals, and those featuring relationships with pets. Drawing upon established scholarship, this book examines human-animal relationships from multiple angles, making it an invaluable resource for librarians, teachers, and students of children's and young adult literature.
Children's Literature and New York City
This collection explores the significance of New York City in children’s literature, stressing literary, political, and societal influences on writing for young people from the twentieth century to the present day. Contextualized in light of contemporary critical and cultural theory, the chapters examine the varying ways in which children’s literature has engaged with New York City as a city space, both in terms of (urban) realism and as an ‘idea’, such as the fantasy of the city as a place of opportunity, or other associations. The collection visits not only dominant themes, motifs, and tropes, but also the different narrative methods employed to tell readers about the history, func...
The Continuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory
"The Continuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory offers the student of literary and cultural studies a comprehensive, single-volume guide to the history and development of criticism in the humanities as the twenty-first century opens. While emphasizing the theory and practice of literary and cultural criticism, it provides extensive coverage of related and contextual discourses, as well as critical overviews of the work and reception of major figures responsible, directly or indirectly, for the development of those discourses in the now-related areas of philosophy, poetics, politics, aesthetics, linguistics and psychoanalysis."--From the "Foreword."
Melancholia and Maturation
“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 chara...
