Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

“To Be Men, Not Destroyers”: Developing Dabrowskian Personalities In Ezra Pound’S The Cantos And Neil Gaiman’S American Gods, Michelle A. Nicholson

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Kazimierz Dabrowski’s psychological theory of positive disintegration is a lesser known theory of personality development that offers an alternative critical perspective of literature. It provides a framework for the characterization of postmodern protagonists who move beyond heroic indoctrination to construct their own self-organized, autonomous identities. Ezra Pound’s The Cantos captures the speaker-poet’s extensive process of inner conflict, providing a unique opportunity to track the progress of the hero’s transformation into a personality, or a man. American Gods is a more fully realized portrayal of a character who undergoes the complete paradigmatic collapse of positive disintegration and deliberate self-derived self-revision …

From Beyond The Grave: Dead Narrators In Young Adult Literature, Jessica L. Branton

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

While scholars and critics have explored various aspects of young adult literature, few have focused on the popular, but odd, use of dead narrators. When examining the dead narrators of Veronica Roth’s Allegiant, Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why, Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall, and Jess Rothenberg’s The Catastrophic History of You and Me, it becomes clear that the dead narrators are used as a foil for adolescent growth and maturation, and they also allow young readers to empathize with and accept death through the protagonists. These protagonists experience a proto-adulthood as they die too soon to …

Cultural And Narrative Shifts Of Nineteenth Century Children's Literature In Hawthorne's Wonder Book For Girls And Boys, Kristen Clark Brandt

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Both folklorists and literary critics have been drawn to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s body of work because of his distinctive style and incorporation of folk motifs. Such motif-spotting presents no challenge in Hawthorne’s juvenile literature like his retellings from Greek mythology in Wonder Book for Girls and Boys; however, contemporary folklore redirects the focus of this scholarship to “how particular literary uses of folklore fit into a larger, more fundamental concept of what folklore is and how and what folklore communicates” (de Caro & Jordan 2015:15). Hawthorne’s work interacts with other forms of cultural expression in the nineteenth century such as dominant …

“The Only Way Out Is In”: Negotiating Identity Through Narrative In The House On Mango Street And The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Brianna E. Taylor

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

While aimed at vastly different audiences, Sandra Cisneros’s beloved coming-of-age story The House on Mango Street and Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao both uniquely capture the complexities of navigating the hyphenated territory between their respective Mexican-American and Dominican-American identities. Cisneros engages readers with the simple yet profound narrative voice of Esperanza in a series of vignettes that subtly reveal a growing consciousness of her role as a young Mexican-American woman and her creative consciousness as an artist. Through the multifaceted narrative perspective of Yunior, Díaz skillfully weaves together “ghetto nerd” Oscar de …

Tracing Writer/Reader Identity In, And In Response To, Queer Latinx Autohistoria-Teorìa, Corrina Wells

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project examines how diverse representation changes the discourse around queer latinx identities. This project extends theories of representation that show how a text changes the imaginary of the reader through a two-part methodology. First, through explicating Spit & Passion and A Cup of Water Under My Bed, this project examines how these texts construct a readers’ imaginary. Then, through a corresponding qualitative assessment on readers’ responses to the texts, this project identifies the extent to which the texts change the beliefs and understandings of a small group of students. Articulating an ecology of identity using the texts under examination, …

With Great Power: Examining The Representation And Empowerment Of Women In Dc And Marvel Comics, Kylee Kilbourne

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout history, comic books and the media they inspire have reflected modern society as it changes and grows. But women’s roles in comics have often been diminished as they become victims, damsels in distress, and sidekicks. This thesis explores the problems that female characters often face in comic books, but it also shows the positive representation that new creators have introduced over the years. This project is a genealogy, in which the development of the empowered superwoman is traced in modern age comic books. This discussion includes the characters of Kamala Khan, Harley Quinn, Gwen Stacy, and Barbara Gordon and …

Asking The Tough Questions: Teaching Literature And Nonfiction Through Critical Literacy To Recapture Our Voices, Agency, And Mission, Elsie L. Olan, Wendy Farkas, Kia Jane Richmond

Conference Presentations

Exploding the Myth of Mental Illness

Disrupting Notions Of Stigma While Empowering Voices: Examining Language Identity, Mental Illness, And Disability Through Young Adult Literature, Elsie L. Olan, Wendy Farkas, Kia Jane Richmond

Conference Presentations

Presenter Two will share new research on young adult literature which features characters with mental illness. She will describe strategies for using texts such as Your Voice is All I Hear (2015), Thirteen Reasons Why (2007), and The Impossible Knife of Memory (2014) to analyze and critique representations of mental illness in young adult literature. Drawing on research by Koss & Teale (2009) and Richmond (2014), this presenter will help session attendees interrogate “the power of language choices” and “become empowered to confront the stigma associated with mental illness and confront bullying” (p. 24).

Young Adult Literature: The Reality On The Page, Chelsea Elmore

Selected Honors Theses

The genre of young adult literature has grown from a didactic category made of problem novels and taboo themes into a mimetic vision of modern life by way of dystopian fiction. In my thesis, I will discuss the ways in which young adult literature has changed over time and what those changes will mean for its readers and its future as a genre. The first section will analyze three groundbreaking novels that have disrupted the previously established didactic mindset of young adult literature. The publication of such novels (The Catcher in the Rye, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret …

The Book That Made Me: A Girl, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this installment of The Book That Made Me, a series from Public Books reflecting on the books that have changed our lives, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reflects on the freedom he received—to become a whole other person, in a whole other place—from an unexpected source.

Adventures With Animals Big And Small, Emily Allen, Marcus Blandford, Shannon Brennan, Brennen Keen, Amanda Timm, Tara Penry, Sarah Obendorf

English Literature Student Projects and Publications

The purpose of this project is to produce a short collection of out-of-print children’s stories that would be suitable for first grade level readers. Stories selected for the collection fit the theme of being seasonally themed and include animals as main protagonists. Under the guidance of Dr. Tara Penry, the class searched children’s magazines from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to find stories that would be relevant and interesting to today’s elementary schoolers.

(Re)Mediating The Spirit: Evangelical Christian Young Adult Media, Tamara Watkins

Theses and Dissertations

"We are in the world, but not of the world," a maxim frequently spoken in evangelical Christian culture, provides insight into how these individuals view their relationship with secular culture. They presume to share the same temporal plane with secular culture, but do not participate in it. In this dissertation, I explore whether the division between evangelical Christian culture and secular culture is as clear as this aphorism implies. To facilitate this investigation, I examine media Christian content creators created for an American evangelical Christian young adult audience in the early twenty-first century, specifically focusing on novel-length fiction, comics and …

Adapting Skazki: How American Authors Reinvent Russian Fairy Tales, Sarah Krasner

Scripps Senior Theses

Adaptations of works have the potential to bring their subject matter to a new audience. This thesis explores the adaptation of Russian fairy tales into novels by authors Orson Scott Card and Joy Preble by looking at how they present Russian fairy tales, folkloric figures, and fairy tale structure to an American audience.

Reframing The Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives In The Post-9/11 Period, Mai-Linh Hong

Faculty Journal Articles

This article considers how recent narratives about Vietnamese refugees engage with the Vietnam War’s visual archive, particularly iconic photographs from the war and ensuing “boat people” crisis, and contribute to present-day discourses on American militarism and immigration. The article focuses on two texts, a National Public Radio special series about a US naval ship (2010) and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again (2011), which recounts a Vietnamese child’s refugee passage. By refiguring famous photojournalistic images from the war, the radio series advances a familiar rescue-and-gratitude narrative in which the US military operates as a care apparatus, exemplifying a cultural …

Decolonizing The Ya North: Environmental Injustice In Sherri L. Smith’S Orleans, Micah-Jade M. Coleman

Master's Theses

Young Adult (YA) dystopias, in recent years, have imagined a future world fueled by the overuse and misuse of technology, the advancement of science for human gain, as well as societies ruled by governments that govern based on their own self-interests and economic gain. Such novels have opened the door for discussion about how the present-day actions of societies can impact the future of the environment; yet many only focus their attention on societies in the North— regions considered “developed” by the western world. In her YA novel, Orleans (2014), Sherri L. Smith focuses attention on the aftermath of Hurricane …

The Lightbringer: A Novel, Brett L. Butler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Lightbringer is about a collision of two worlds: the world of a contemporary South Florida town and the magical world of Zariel, bringing with it the universal threat of the Terra. Childhood friends, Breck and Tom, are thrown into the middle of an ancient conflict between the Terra—a collection of alien races that have been transformed by darkness—and the forces of good. After an encounter with a magical pool of golden water, the boys must learn to use their new abilities to protect against the growing Terranox army. In the midst of their struggle, however, a mysterious companion—the Lightbringer, …

Characters Through Time, Alyssa Venezia

Honors Thesis

T. S. Eliot once wrote that we “often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [an author’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (Eliot 37). By focusing on character adaptations, one comes to understand how authors of children’s books are able to adapt classic literature into age-appropriate texts that retain the merits of the original. Five sets of characters shall be analyzed to demonstrate the success of the adaptations presented in children’s literature. In the first, Sir Bedivere from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur …

Protecting Dixie: Southern Girlhood In Children's Literature, 1852-1920, Laura Anne Hakala

Dissertations

Most scholarship about girlhood in children’s literature tends to rely on national models of girlhood. My project complicates those models by demonstrating how region shapes distinct forms of American girlhood. In particular, I examine representations of southern girlhood in children’s literature published between 1852 and 1920, drawing on the four types of literature that most featured southern girls during this time period: abolitionist literature, Confederate literature, postbellum plantation fiction, and family stories. Using a historicist methodology and spatial analysis, I place these texts in relation to information about the spatial arrangements and protocols of southern domestic sites. By viewing girlhood …

The Rise And Fall Of Female Stereotypes In Looking For Alaska, Alina Zabolotico

Audre Lorde Prize

No abstract provided.

Obesity Among Young American Indian Adults In North Dakota, Abby Omahen

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Obesity among American Indian young adults is a significant health problem. There is an increase in the prevalence rate of diseases associated with obesity which tend to have high medical costs and high mortality rates. Fruit and vegetable consumption, exercise, gender and education are factors which could affect obesity among American Indians. Therefore, the primary purpose of the current study was to determine if there was an association between certain factors (fruit and vegetable consumption, exercise, gender and education level) and obesity among young American Indian adults in North Dakota. The secondary purpose was to determine if there was a …

"Playing Superhero": Agency And The Role Of The Teenaged Superhero, Jessica R. Saunders

Theses & Honors Papers

The discussion of agency within Young Adult Literature is an extensive topic that includes various criteria, such as power in various types of relationships and social ideologies. In the media form of graphic novels, the concept of agency is taken to a separate level because the primary teenagers depicted in graphic novels are titled as superheroes with abilities that surpass the norm. The role of being a teenaged superhero becomes conditional, depending on whether the teenager demands agency in the form of controlling his/her abilities or are assigned the role by their adult prototypes and society. The texts that this …

Reasonable Conversions: Susanna Rowan's Mentoria And Conversion Narratives For Young Readers, Karen Roggenkamp

Faculty Publications

Though not well known, Rowson's Mentoria-a curious conglomeration of thematically-related pieces from multiple genres, including the essay, epistolary novel, conduct book, and fairy tale-offers particularly fertile ground for thinking about the nexus between eighteenth-century didactic books and earlier works for young readers.2 At the heart of Mentoria is a series of letters describing girls who yield, with dire and frequently deadly consequences, to the passionate pleas of male suitors.3 Fallen women populate Rowson's world, and scholars have traditionally read Mentoria within the familiar bounds of the eighteenth-century seduction novel.4 However, Rowson's creation transforms the older tradition of didactic, child-centered conversion …

Male Adolescents Of Divorce: The Relationship With Their Noncustodial Father, Christine L. Kerr

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the divorce rate in the United States began to rise dramatically in the 1970s, researchers have studied the impact of divorce on those involved. The research indicates that children whose parents divorce are more likely than children whose parents remain married to suffer from a lower level of well-being and are at greater risk for a myriad of ills including poorer school performance and increased behavior problems. While few researchers have focused on the impact of divorce on male adolescents specifically, studies of adolescent males in general indicate they are at risk for a variety of problems including poor …

Preservation Of The Family Unit In Adolescent Novels, Mary M. Hutchings

Masters Theses

This thesis discusses the development of the family story from the late nineteenth century to the present, beginning with What Katy Did as an example of the earlier moral story from which this genre grows. It then focuses on Little Women as the beginning of the modern family story and uses Jo from Little Women as the starting point to discuss the development of the female adolescent protagonist in these stories. And lastly, comparing Little Women to modern family life stories which began to appear about 1940, the thesis discusses changes in didacticism which have occurred since the late nineteenth …

The Ingalls And Wilder Families In Florida, Mary Evelyn Thurman

Publications

No abstract provided.

L. Frank Baum And The Technology Of Love, Robert Bruce Goble

Masters Theses

L. Frank Baum, throughout his books of fantasy, especially the Oz series, gradually resolves the conflict of pastoralism and technology by developing a technology managed by love. Baum uses magic as a representation of both pastoralism and technology. Fairy magic, the capacity for love, represents pastoralism, and ritual magic, the capacity for good or evil depending upon who wields it, represents technology. Baum deals with the ways in which ritual magic or technology can be misused through selfishness and ignorance and points out how destruction can be avoided if technology were managed by not greed for power and money but …

Francesca Da Rimini In Dramatic Literature, Bill Lattin

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

A Survey Of Junior High School Literature Texts Based Upon An Evaluation Of Literary Characteristics, William R. Moore

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Cat Who Went To Heaven, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Lynd Ward

Zea E-Books in American Studies

Winner of the Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature in 1931, this novel is the story of a struggling Japanese artist and his housekeeper who adopt a three-colored cat and how that affects their lives and fortunes. Commissioned to make a painting of the death of Buddha to be hung in the village temple, the artist imagines the various animals whose forms had been taken in the Buddha’s past lives and the generous deeds they had done, as the cat—auspiciously named “Good Fortune”—looks on with hopes to be included. Could a cat, from a species usually so proud …

Fictional Advertisement, An Illustration From "Tom Clifton...." By Warren Lee Goss, 1892: "Gang Of 25 Sea Island Cotton And Rice Negroes", Warren Lee Goss

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

This item was originally created and disseminated as an illustration in the novel Tom Clifton, or, Western boys in Grant and Sherman's army, '61-'65, by Warren Lee Goss, published in 1892. The advertisement appeared on an unnumbered page in chapter 7.

This is a fictional advertisement for a sale of 25 enslaved people in Charleston, S.C. at Ryan's Mart on Chalmers Street, September 25, 1852.