Understanding (Post)feminist Girlhood Through Young Adult Fantasy Literature

By: Elizabeth Little

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Synopsis: 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.