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

Description

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. Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction 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.

Leah Phillips is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Plymouth Marjon University, UK. She is the founder of the Young Adult Literature, Media, and Culture Association and was co-organiser of Adolescent Identities, a project exploring representation in YA fiction. Dr Phillips serves on the Children's Literature Association's Phoenix Committee.

A valuable re-visioning of the hero myth through the figure of the female hero, this study also offers a new perspective on fantasy worlds created by women over the last forty years. -- Alison Waller, University of Roehampton, UK Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction offers readers compelling ways to reframe conventional understandings of the hero figure, YA fantasy literature, and constructions of adolescent womanhood more generally. -- Sara K. Day, Truman State University, USA