Reading like a girl [electronic resource] : narrative intimacy in contemporary American young adult literature / Sara K. Day.
2013
PS374.I57 D39 2013eb
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Details
Title
Reading like a girl [electronic resource] : narrative intimacy in contemporary American young adult literature / Sara K. Day.
Author
Day, Sara K.
ISBN
9781621039600 (electronic book)
9781617038112
9781617038112
Imprint
Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2013.
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (ix, 240 pages)
Call Number
PS374.I57 D39 2013eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
813/.60992837
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"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
Series
Children's Literature Association series.
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Online Access
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Table of Contents
"She is a creature designed for reading" : Narrative intimacy and the adolescent woman reader
"Opening myself like a book to the spine" : Disclosure and discretion in constructions of friendship
"He couldn't get close enough" : The exploration and relegation of desire
"She doesn't say a word" : Violations and reclamations of intimacy
"What if someone reads it?" : Concealment and relevation in diary fiction
"Let me know what you think" : Fan fiction and the reimagining of narrative intimacy.
"Opening myself like a book to the spine" : Disclosure and discretion in constructions of friendship
"He couldn't get close enough" : The exploration and relegation of desire
"She doesn't say a word" : Violations and reclamations of intimacy
"What if someone reads it?" : Concealment and relevation in diary fiction
"Let me know what you think" : Fan fiction and the reimagining of narrative intimacy.