Post-disaster fiction for young adults : some trends and variations

In the forty years or so since it began to develop as a sub-genre of young adult fiction, post-disaster fiction has commented on a range of issues, including perceived social fears of the time, the nature of various types of society, and what people need in order to be truly human. This paper explores how young adult post-disaster fiction makes comment on these and other issues. It argues that within this genre there are three connected sub-genres, with the disaster having a different function in each, and the nature of the comments made by each of these sub-genres tending also to be different. As its title suggests, this paper includes texts in which the focus is on life after the disaster. The genre&rsquo;s strong link with both the nature of young adult fiction and with adolescence itself suggests that it will continue to flourish as a sub-genre.<br /

Visions of the virtual : the role of computers and artificial intelligence in a selection of Australian young adult fiction

Advances in computer technology over the last twenty years have resulted in a number of different visions of what it means to be real, and of what it means to be human. This paper will explore how computers and artificial intelligence are used as major themes in four Australian novels written for young adults: Gillian Rubinstein&rsquo;s Space Demons trilogy &mdash; comprising Space Demons, Skymaze and Shinkei &mdash; and Michael Pryor&rsquo;s The Mask of Caliban. In so doing, the paper will look at how these texts explore the relationship between increasingly developed technology and visions of a better world. By comparing a series of oppositions that occur in all four books, this paper will look at how the theme of technology is used to privilege particular values and to advocate particular beliefs.<br /

‘Many a story is but a crooked way to the truth’? Lessons from the Past as Truths for the Present in a Selection of Arthurian Young Adult Disaster Fictions

The myth of King Arthur has been used for many purposes. In post-disaster fiction for young adults, the Arthurian myth has been drawn upon by a number of authors to advocate unity and equality as major factors in creating a just and peaceful world. This article focuses on seven texts set after major global disaster caused by human action has devastated, or is threatening to devastate, the world of the implied present-day reader. The texts for discussion are Ron Langenus’ Merlin’s Return; Janice Elliott’s The King Awakes and The Empty Throne; and Pamela Service’s Winter of Magic’s Return, Tomorrow’s Magic, Yesterday’s Magic, and Earth’s Magic. Although King Arthur is portrayed differently by the three authors, he is presented as a figurehead of unity and peace in all of the texts, and the texts all transpose contemporary values held by the implied author and the implied reader onto what the texts present as ‘King Arthur’s time’, in order to suggest that greed, selfishness, and lust for power contributed to the destruction of King Arthur’s society, and are also threatening to destroy the world of the implied reader. Drawing upon Foucault’s concept of the regime of truth, this article demonstrates that the forms of the Arthurian myth used in the texts for discussion are, however, inherently gendered and nationalistic, and thus subvert the ideas of equality and unity that the texts seek to present.

‘When I was a child I thought as a child ...’: The Importance of Memory in Constructions of Childhood and Social Order in a Selection of Post-disaster Fictions

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article: This paper will analyse the construction of childhood in three post-disaster texts for young readers: Ruth Hooker’s Kennaquhair, Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah, and Hugh Scott’s Why Weeps the Brogan?, exploring how the relationship between particular notions of childhood and memory are used to show protagonists’assumption of power and hence choice in how they respond to the social orders in which they find themselves. ‘Power’ has been defined in many ways, but I will use the definition which Roberta Trites draws from the work of Judith Butler: ‘Power is the force that allows for subjectivity and consequently, agency’ (Trites 2000, p.3). Whereas O’Brien’s and Scott’s novels place their protagonists in dystopian settings, Hooker’s Kennaquhair presents a small-scale utopia and implies a younger readership than do the other two texts, and I will argue that the utopia in this text can only work in narrative terms because the novel is aimed at children rather than young adults

Post-disaster Fiction for Young Adults: Some Trends and Variations

Taking as its central question: 'What narrative functions does the disaster in young adult postdisaster fiction have?', this paper explores how the genre is utilised to make comment on a range of issues, and argues that there are three connected sub-genres within young adult post-disaster fiction, with the disaster having a different function in each, and the nature of the comments made by each of these sub-genres tending also to be different. Stephens considers that: 'The main distinguishing feature of the genre is that its texts are set in a fantasy future which exists some time after the world we know has been destroyed by a cataclysmic disaster, usually caused by human actions' (1992, p.126). This paper broadens this definition to include texts in which the disaster actually happens but in which the focus is on life after the disaster. It understands fantasy to include speculative fiction which seeks to portray pre-disaster life as similar to the implied young adult reader's, as well as works of high fantasy in which the disaster has made Earth into a kind of secondary world (see Sands 1998, p.232), and focuses on novels in which the disaster has clearly been caused by humans in some way

‘Something of You that You Couldn’t Tell Me with Words’: Music, Affect, and Social Change in Gregory Maguire’s I Feel Like the Morning Star and Emma Trevayne’s Coda

‘Music’, laments eighteen-year-old Anthem in Emma Trevayne’s Coda (2013), ‘used to be a voice against injustice. And now it is the injustice’ (p. 89, emphasis in original). The capacity of music to change people’s psychological and physiological states is a major part of how the dystopian authorities in the post-disaster society into which Anthem was born keep control over their citizens. This ability that music has to influence people individually or as a group is also an important mechanism, however, in the overthrow of those same authorities. Music as a tool for facilitating action against injustice is also explored in Gregory Maguire’s I Feel Like the Morning Star (1989), from which the quotation in the title of this paper is taken. Various real-world examples also show how music has been closely entwined with social revolution, such as in the overthrow of British monarch James Stuart in the seventeenth century (see Harol 2012, p. 583), the twentieth-century civil rights movement in America (see Friedman xv), the 2011 toppling of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, and also the removal from authority of Husni Mubarak in Egypt (see LeVine 2012, p. 794). Anthem’s statement about music as a voice against injustice invites the reader to see the young man’s struggle against the repressive Corporation as part of a long line of revolutions in which music has played a major role. Both I Feel Like the Morning Star and Coda show how tonal-rhythmic patterns coded by a given culture as ‘music’ (see Elliot 2000, p. 85) can inspire social and individual change by bringing people closer to a sense of who they intuit themselves to be and by facilitating intrapersonal and interpersonal communication at a level deeper than words, which positions those involved to challenge the stultifying and life- threatening dystopia in which they live