Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction - Reframing Myths of Adolescent Girlhood

The heroic romance is one of the West''s most enduring narratives, found everywhere, from religion and myth to blockbuster films and young adult literature. Within this story, adolescent girls are not, and cannot be, the heroes. They are, at best, the hero''s bride, a prize he wins for slaying monsters. Crucially, although the girl''s exclusion from heroic selfhood affects all girls, it does not do so equally- whiteness and able-bodiedness are taken as markers of heightened, fantasy femininity. explores how the young female-heroes of mythopoeic YA, a Tolkienian-inspired genre drawing on myth''s world-creating power and YA''s liminal potential, disrupt the conventional heroic narrative. These heroes, such as Tamora Pierce''s Alanna the Lioness, Daine the Wildmage, and Marissa Meyer''s Cinder and Iko, offer a model of being-hero, an embodied way of living and being in this world that disrupts the typical hero''s violent hierarchy, isolating individuality, and erasure of difference. In doing so, they push the boundaries of what it means to be a hero, a girl, and even human.>

Product details

• Authors: Leah Phillips
• Assisted by: Claire Nally (Editor), Angela Smith (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 22.08.2024
• EAN: 9781350194236
• ISBN: 978-1-350-19423-6
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 138 mm x 216 mm x 12 mm
• Series: Library of Gender and Popular Culture; Library of Gender and Popular
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Media Studies, Popular Culture, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women's Studies, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies, Society & culture: general, LITERARY CRITICISM / Children's & Young Adult Literature, Gender studies, gender groups, Gender studies: women, Gender studies: women and girls, Children’s and teenage literature studies: general