Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction: Reframing Myths of Adolescent Girlhood by Leah Phillips (Plymouth Marjon University, UK)
The heroic romance is one of the Wests 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 heros bride, a prize he wins for slaying monsters. Crucially, although the girls 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 myths world-creating power and YAs 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 heros 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.