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

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Leah Phillips (Plymouth Marjon University, UK)

Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction

Reframing Myths of Adolescent Girlhood

Leah Phillips (Plymouth Marjon University, UK)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
23 February 2023

Children's literature studies: general; Popular culture; Media studies; Gender studies: women

Series: Library of Gender and Popular Culture

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.

By: Leah Phillips (Plymouth Marjon University UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 138mm,
ISBN: 9781350119338
ISBN 10: 1350119334
Series: Library of Gender and Popular Culture
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 23 February 2023
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Series Editors’ Introduction Preface 1.The hero’s prize: The myth of ‘successful’ adolescent girlhood 2. Mythopoeic YA: Bringing new worlds into being to conceive new ways of being 3.Disrupting the myth: Alanna becomes a warrior-maiden 4.Breaking the mirror: Cinder(ella) is a cyborg 5.Engendering a new myth: Daine is ‘of the people’ 6.Being-Hero: Relational, embodied, procreative selfhoo Appendices Notes Bibliography Index

Leah Phillips is Senior Lecturer in English at Plymouth Marjon University, UK. She is the Programme Lead for the BA English and MA Literature for Children and Young Adults and is the President and Founder of the YA Studies Association (YASA).

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

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