Fantasies and subversions: Reworkings of fantasy in young adult literature

In Tales, Then and Now: More Folktales as Literary Fictions for Young Adults, editors Anna E. Altmann and Gail de Vos define "reworkings" of folk tales as "versions that are more radically changed than simple retellings" (xvii). This dissertation explores contemporary Young Adult reworkings---in novels, short stories, and film---of fairy tale and fantasy sources from a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective. By examining constructions of sex, power, and violence, and the socialization of the female reading subject through patriarchal romance narratives, we can see how the genre of fantasy encodes cultural fantasies of gender and gender relations. By examining the constructions of female subjectivity, female bodies, and adolescence encoded in the source texts, we can then see how contemporary YA authors challenge or preserve these constructions.; Chapter 1 reads contemporary constructions of the Victorian erotic child, as defined by James Kincaid, Jacqueline Rose, and Marina Warner, in reworkings of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and James Barrie's Peter Pan by Jane Yolen, Karen Wallace, and in the films "Peter Pan" and "Finding Neverland." Chapter 2 uses the gender subversion in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" to read reworkings of "Sleeping Beauty," "Beauty and the Beast" and Bram Stoker's Dracula, arguing that authors Robin McKinley and Meredith Ann Pierce undermine traditional YA romance conventions by shifting the erotic focus from male love objects to bonds of friendship, family, or eroticism between women. Chapter 3 looks at constructions of rape, narrative, and violence in reworkings of "Sleeping Beauty," "Donkeyskin," and "The Seven Swans" by Adele Geras, Robin McKinley and Juliet Marillier, in which sexual violence against the female body is linked to the threat of silencing and death, and the inherent weakness in Symbolic Law to protect the female body and subjectivity; both the use of silence as resistance and the recovery of voice through narrative are linked to the preservation of female subjectivity and to Julia Kristeva's notion of the dialogic relationship between the semiotic and the Symbolic. Through these chapters, reinterpretations in Young Adult Fiction are linked to changing cultural conceptions of adolescence, gender, romance, and sex.