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208 pages, 5 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches, 2000
$19.00 paper, 0-87745-857-X, 978-0-87745-857-9
Winner of the 2002 Children's Literature Association's book award
Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature
by Roberta Seelinger Trites is the winner of the 2002 Children's
Literature Association's Book Award. The award is given annually in
order to promote and recognize outstanding contributions to children's
literature, history, scholarship, and criticisim; it is one of the
highest academic honors that can accrue to an author of children's
literary criticism.
“What makes Trites' book so significant is the grandness of its theme.
She not only expounds upon the role of power in young adult literature,
but she also points out that some of this literature has the potential
to empower its adolescent readers. ”—Mark I. West, president of the
Children's Literature Association
“Informed by theorists ranging from Lacan to Eagleton to Jameson to Foucault to Barthes, Disturbing the Universe
is a cogent and thought-provoking work that breaks new ground in young
adult literature and postmodern studies. ”—Sherrie A. Inness, associate
professor of English, Miami University
“For many working within the field of children’s literature, this book will come as a welcome addition to an expanding corpus.”— Yearbook of English Studies
The
Young Adult novel is ordinarily characterized as a coming-of-age story,
in which the narrative revolves around the individual growth and
maturation of a character, but Roberta Trites expands this notion by
chronicling the dynamics of power and repression that weave their way
through YA books. Characters in these novels must learn to negotiate
the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within
which they function, including family, church, government, and school.
Trites argues that the development of the genre over the past thirty
years is an outgrowth of postmodernism, since YA novels are, by
definition, texts that interrogate the social construction of
individuals. Drawing on such nineteenth-century precursors as Little Women and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Disturbing the Universe
demonstrates how important it is to employ poststructuralist
methodologies in analyzing adolescent literature, both in critical
studies and in the classroom. Among the twentieth-century authors
discussed are Blume, Hamilton, Hinton, Le Guin, L'Engle, and Zindel.
Trites' work has applications for a broad range of readers, including
scholars of children's literature and theorists of post-modernity as
well as librarians and secondary-school teachers.
Roberta Trites
is associate professor of English and associate dean, College of Arts
and Sciences, at Illinois State University, where she teaches
children's and adolescent literature. She is author of Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels (Iowa), which won an ALA Choice Award.
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