Constructing the adolescent reader in contemporary young adult fiction

Bibliographic Information

Constructing the adolescent reader in contemporary young adult fiction

Elisabeth Rose Gruner

(Critical approaches to children's literature / series editors, Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford)

Palgrave Macmillan, c2019

Available at  / 3 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

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.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Young Adults, Reading, and Young Adult Reading.- 2. Reading in School.- 3. Misreading the Classics: Gender, Genre, and Agency in YA Romance.- 4. "Dreaming Themselves into Existence": Reading and Race.- 5. Magic, Prophetic, and Sacred Books: Making Communities of Readers.- 6. Reading, Resistance, and Political Agency.- 7. Epilogue: Reading Reading in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

by "Nielsen BookData"

Related Books: 1-1 of 1

Details

Page Top