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Reading Like a Girl Sara K. Day

Reading Like a Girl By Sara K. Day

Reading Like a Girl by Sara K. Day


Summary

By examining the novels of critically and commercially successful authors such as Sarah Dessen, Stephenie Meyer, and Laurie Halse Anderson, Reading Like a Girl explores the use of narrative intimacy as a means of reflecting and reinforcing larger, often contradictory, cultural expectations regarding adolescent women, interpersonal relationships, and intimacy.

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Reading Like a Girl Summary

Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature by Sara K. Day

By examining the novels of critically and commercially successful authors such as Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You), Stephenie Meyer (the Twilight series), and Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak), Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature explores the use of narrative intimacy as a means of reflecting and reinforcing larger, often contradictory, cultural expectations regarding adolescent women, interpersonal relationships, and intimacy. Reading Like a Girl explains the construction of narrator-reader relationships in recent American novels written about adolescent women and marketed to adolescent women.

Sara K. Day explains, though, that such levels of imagined friendship lead to contradictory cultural expectations for the young women so deeply obsessed with reading these novels. Day coins the term narrative intimacy to refer to the implicit relationship between narrator and reader that depends on an imaginary disclosure and trust between the story's narrator and the reader. Through critical examination, the inherent contradictions between this enclosed, imagined relationship and the real expectations for adolescent women's relations prove to be problematic.

In many novels for young women, adolescent female narrators construct conceptions of the adolescent woman reader, constructions that allow the narrator to understand the reader as a confidant, a safe and appropriate location for disclosure. At the same time, such novels offer frequent warnings against the sort of unfettered confession the narrators perform. Friendships are marked as potential sites of betrayal and rejection. Romantic relationships are presented as inherently threatening to physical and emotional health. And so, the narrator turns to the reader for an ally who cannot judge. The reader, in turn, may come to depend upon narrative intimacy in order to vicariously explore her own understanding of human expression and bonds.

About Sara K. Day

Sara K. Day, Magnolia, Arkansas, is assistant professor of English at Southern Arkansas University. Her work has appeared in Studies of the Novel and North Carolina Literary Review.

Additional information

CIN1496804473A
9781496804471
1496804473
Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature by Sara K. Day
Used - Well Read
Paperback
University Press of Mississippi
2015-09-08
252
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book. We do our best to provide good quality books for you to read, but there is no escaping the fact that it has been owned and read by someone else previously. Therefore it will show signs of wear and may be an ex library book

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