Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

Defying Normativity: Reclaiming A Narrative Of Queer Resistance In Young Adult Literature, Christopher Morabito

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the heart of this dissertation lies a single question: how Queer is Queer Young Adult Literature? As many scholars have argued, Queerness is, in many ways, a literacy, and literature is one of the greatest sponsors of Queer Literacy. While there is certainly no one comprehensive definition of what it means to be queer, it is also true that the general understanding of queerness has changed quite drastically in the last few decades. What was once used as a term to describe someone who is outside of social conventions has slowly begun to lose its sense of “otherness,” and …

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Examining The Power And Privilege Of Escapism In Young Adult Literature And Its Culture, Stacey Watson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will explore the systematic biases embedded within this genre, highlighting the ongoing battle between tokenism and inclusive storytelling. Thesis will also emphasize the importance of this genre, its tight grasp on popular culture, and showcase positive representations introduced by new creators over the years.

Reading The World: American Haredi Children's Literature, 1980–2000, Dainy Bernstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children’s literature is an important force in building not only linguistic literacy but a literacy of the world, showing the child reader how to make sense of themselves in relation to the many people, objects, experiences, and concepts around them. Haredi children’s texts foster a mode of understanding the world around them as comprehensible through the texts, people, and events of the past. In Reading the World, I demonstrate that Haredi children’s textual culture between 1980 and 2000 fostered a literacy of language, text, time, space, morals, and general knowledge as inextricably intertwined, and that this literacy propelled further …

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.

Mira Muchacha: The Latinx Bildungsroman In Elizabeth Acevedo’S The Poet X, Layza M. Garcia

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores how the Bildungsroman’s traditional narrative transforms into a window to the Latinx experience in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X. The traditional Bildungsroman features white, male, and European protagonists, according to Louis F. Caton in “Romantic Struggles: The Bildungsroman and Mother-Daughter Bonding in Jamaica Kinclad’s Annie John” (126). Recognized as the first work in the Bildungsroman genre, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) tracks the development and education of the protagonist from boyhood to manhood. In 20th and 21st century literature, the Bildungsroman structure expands to reflect the diverse cultures, lifestyles, and identities of its readers. …

Elizabeth Kent’S New Tales Of Botanical Friendship, Leila Walker

Publications and Research

Elizabeth Kent has been considered a rather minor figure in the Leigh Hunt circle. However, this examination of her previously unknown children’s tales illuminates how Kent’s generic crossings establish a common emphasis on observation in the realms of botany, pedagogy, and poetry while suggesting that what happens beyond the observable world might be equally generative. Taken as a whole, Kent’s work constitutes a previously unacknowledged challenge to the Cockney School’s almost fetishistic attachment to the social. The identification of New Tales brings into focus Kent’s efforts to systematize friendship through her writing and clarifies her ambiguous response to Cockney amiability.

Returning To Childhood: Memoirs Of Childhood Reading, Stephanie Montalti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading, Jane Sullivan’s Storytime: Growing up with Books, and Margaret Mackey’s One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography to investigate how memoirists recall events and reread stories from childhood. I argue that memoirs of childhood reading or bibliomemoirs temporarily fuse childhood and adulthood through the act of rereading, which produces emotional responses, and writing a memoir. By rereading childhood stories, memoirists identify with their child self and express feelings comparable to those they felt upon first reading. In bibliomemoirs, passive and active reading create what I describe as a …

Crafting Girlhoods, Elissa E. Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Crafting Girlhoods emphasizes nineteenth and early twentieth century British and American girls' agency and creativity within the prescribed limits of educational crafts—including sewing and periodical-making. My first section shows how girls use psychological means to resist the cultural and gendered imperatives of sewing and tidiness, while my second section shows how girls resisted the censorship and harassment that the newspaper and periodical forms allowed by creating intimate communities in the pages of their periodicals that could help them negotiate these difficulties. In both cases, I will show how the craft forms themselves were their own antidote to the constricting force …

Feminist Theology And The Fantastic In Jewish Poetics And Children's Literature (1960s–Present), Meira S. Levinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the development of Jewish fantasy rhetoric in post-WWII British and American literature, focusing on three genres: kabbalistic Beat poetry, children’s fantasy, and graphic novels/comics. Despite increasing scholarly attention to all these areas, little work has focused on fantasy rhetoric or issues of gender and sexuality within non-canonical Jewish literature, or on interplays of religion and fantasy in children’s literature. Jewish kabbalistic poetry and children’s fantasy speak to each other in their mutual engagements with the otherworldly, mystical and monstrous, interrogations of gender, and complex portrayals of feminist theological potentialities. I identify and analyze Jewish-hermeneutic themes and methodologies …

The Gen Z Zombie: Ya Takes On The Undead, Jason Mccormick

Theses and Dissertations

After the terror attacks of 9/11, zombie stories experienced an unprecedented boom, or for some critics, a renaissance. Fears of mass death, infiltration by the Other, and life before and after the apocalyptic moment were played out through zombie stories. The longevity of the boom also saw the zombie myth move into strange new places including Young Adult novels, resulting in what I refer to as the “Gen Z zombie.”

In his discussion of the sympathetic zombie, Kyle William Bishop mentions YA zombie texts including Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth and Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies but groups …

“The Childish, The Transformative, And The Queer”: Queer Interventions As Praxis In Children’S Cartoons, Heather Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud considers “the simplified reality of the cartoon,” establishing a definition and theory for the medium (30). McCloud believes that cartoons possess “a special power” that is tied to their unique ability to “focus our attention on an idea” (31). Put simply, there is something about cartoons that allows for an easy exchange of concepts. Cartoons can teach. Using cartoons, a general term, to refer to both comics and animation, this thesis examines the transformative power of queer world building and intervention in recent children’s cartoons and how it functions, and can …

Ecologies Of Embodied Minds Embedded: Radical Romantic Perspectives On Architectures Of Technology, Sharmaine Browne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores Romantic responses to the role of architectural technologies in the development of material being, consciousness, and culture by applying a critical approach in which I combine radical embodied cognitive theory, ecocritical perspectives, and a phenomenological lens to select Romantic texts written from 1789 to 1884 in response to industrial modernity. While scholarship has thoroughly explored technology as a cultural force which inevitably shapes consciousness, I propose that a slight shift of emphasis from technology’s external influence to the material internalization of its influence allows for new perspectives—particularly in light of recent proposals in cognitive philosophy which assert …

The Fantastic Manifesto: Monstrosity Of Memory And Epiphany Of Selfhood In The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973), Layla Blodgett Carrillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spanish culture of storytelling suffered under the nearly forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The government-regulated cinema welcomed propaganda and melodrama, and denied the fantastic, the legendary, and the magical. These carefully manipulated histories, which served to romanticize the ideologies of the regime, also served to eulogize the delinquent and the depraved. In the early 1970s, at the heels of the collapse of Franco’s reign, the people of Spain bore witness to a new national cinema. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), the feature debut from Victor Erice, exists at the threshold between a storied history of Spanish dictatorship and …

Queen Alice And The Monstrous Child: Alice Through The Looking Glass, Veronica Schanoes

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Music And Words: Connecting The Love Of Music With Language, Eileen P. Kennedy, Raymond Torres- Santos

Publications and Research

Children from different cultures have a natural affinity for rhymes, rhythm and music. Imagine if students were able, from the beginning of their education and experiences with academic writing and literacy, to access their unconscious and original selves from which to create their writing. The study of music can help to access this aware, inventive side that can enhance anyone’s writing. As an early childhood writing teacher and a composition teacher, we draw on our experiences with young children with words and music. We examine the relationship between music and words in an effort to bring the primitive drive of …

"What's The Use Of Trying To Read Shakespeare?": Modes Of Memory In Virginia Woolf's Fiction And Essays, Sara Remedios Bloom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation maps the relationship between Virginia Woolf’s fiction and essays, and William Shakespeare’s person and plays. I argue that Woolf’s writing is intended as an interactive practice of cultural memory, challenging her readers to become responders and to engage critically with the canon. I further argue that Woolf offers herself as inheritor of a literary practice that actively seeks to shape the values and social ideology of the time. The introduction defines three modes of memory operating in Woolf’s work: memory as opiate; memory as political instrument; and memory as dialectic. The first chapter shows the cultural memory of …

Portraits Of Children Of Alcoholics: Stories That Add Hope To Hope, Meagan Lacy

Publications and Research

This literary analysis examines the emergence of children of alcoholics narratives and their growth from "resource" texts to literary subgenre. While early texts offer useful information about parental alcoholism, they are also limited. Namely, they do not adequately mirror the diversity of children, families, and problems associated with parental alcoholism nor do they offer alternatives for children whose parents do not, or cannot, seek treatment for their addiction. Literature, on the other hand, in inviting what philosopher Martha Nussbaum refers to as "narrative play," can help children learn to understand and empathize with others, nourish their inner curiosity, and, most …

Doubling And Multiplying The Self/Story In Catherynne M. Valente's The Ice Puzzle: Readers, Writers, And The Best Of All Girls, Veronica Schanoes

Publications and Research

Is there a difference between the doubled self and the multiplied self? Using Kelly Link’s “The Girl Detective,” a revision of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” and Catherynne M. Valente’s online novel The Ice Puzzle, a revision of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” I suggest that the joy taken in the multiplied self in these texts reflects the nontraditional approaches to publishing and their readers that these authors have taken.

Fearless Children And Fabulous Monsters: Angela Carter, Lewis Carroll, And Beastly Girls, Veronica L. Schanoes

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.