Reading like a girl : narrative intimacy in contemporary American young adult literature

Resource Information

The work Reading like a girl : narrative intimacy in contemporary American young adult literature represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Bates College. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Reading like a girl : narrative intimacy in contemporary American young adult literature

Title remainder

narrative intimacy in contemporary American young adult literature

Statement of responsibility

Sara K. Day

Creator

• Day, Sara K
• Day, Sara K
• Day, Sara K

Subject

• American fiction -- 21st century -- History and criticism
• American fiction -- 21st century -- History and criticism
• American fiction -- 21st century -- History and criticism
• Girls in literature
• Girls in literature
• Girls in literature
• Intimacy (Psychology) in literature
• Intimacy (Psychology) in literature
• Intimacy (Psychology) in literature
• Teenage girls -- Books and reading -- United States
• Teenage girls -- Books and reading -- United States
• Teenage girls -- Books and reading -- United States
• Young adult literature, American -- History and criticism
• Young adult literature, American -- History and criticism
• Young adult literature, American -- History and criticism
• Adolescence in literature
• Adolescence in literature
• Adolescence in literature

Language

eng

Summary

"By examining the novels of critically and commercially successful authors such as Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You), Stephenie Meyer (the Twilight series), and Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak), Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature explores the use of narrative intimacy as a means of reflecting and reinforcing larger, often contradictory, cultural expectations regarding adolescent women, interpersonal relationships, and intimacy. Reading Like a Girl explains the construction of narrator-reader relationships in recent American novels written about adolescent women and marketed to adolescent women. Sara K. Day explains, though, that such levels of imagined friendship lead to contradictory cultural expectations for the young women so deeply obsessed with reading these novels. Day coins the term "narrative intimacy" to refer to the implicit relationship between narrator and reader that depends on an imaginary disclosure and trust between the story's narrator and the reader. Through critical examination, the inherent contradictions between this enclosed, imagined relationship and the real expectations for adolescent women's relations prove to be problematic. In many novels for young women, adolescent female narrators construct conceptions of the adolescent woman reader, constructions that allow the narrator to understand the reader as a confidant, a safe and appropriate location for disclosure. At the same time, such novels offer frequent warnings against the sort of unfettered confession the narrators perform. Friendships are marked as potential sites of betrayal and rejection. Romantic relationships are presented as inherently threatening to physical and emotional health. And so, the narrator turns to the reader for an ally who cannot judge. The reader, in turn, may come to depend upon narrative intimacy in order to vicariously explore her own understanding of human expression and bonds"--

Member of

• Children's Literature Association series

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Children's literature association series