View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Bedfordshire Repository Title: Redefining Borders: Exploring Narrative Stance, Intertextuality, Ideology and Reader Positioning in Radical Crossover Fiction Name: Chantal Oliver This is a digitised version of a dissertation submitted to the University of Bedfordshire. It is available to view only. This item is subject to copyright. REDEFINING BORDERS: EXPLORING NARRATIVE STANCE, INTERTEXTUALITY, IDEOLOGY AND READER POSITIONING IN RADICAL CROSSOVER FICTION Chantal Oliver Ph.D 2014 University of Bedfordshire October 2014 REDEFINING BORDERS: EXPLORING NARRATIVE STANCE, INTERTEXTUALITY, IDEOLOGY AND READER POSITIONING IN RADICAL CROSSOVER FICTION Chantal Oliver Ph.D 2014 University of Bedfordshire RIMAP A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 2014 REDEFINING BORDERS: EXPLORING NARRATIVE STANCE, INTERTEXTUALITY, IDEOLOGY AND READER POSITIONING IN RADICAL CROSSOVER FICTION Chantal Oliver ABSTRACT The huge popularity of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels and Philip Pullman’s challenging trilogy His Dark Materials flagged up a widening audience and increasing status for children’s literature in the West. As Sandra Beckett (2009) notes, children’s fiction is now being embraced with enthusiasm by adult readers, writers, critics and publishers. From this increased profile there has emerged the distinct publishing category of ‘crossover’ fiction. In contrast to earlier children’s novels with broad audience appeal, contemporary crossover works are noted for their contextually radical resistance to conventions and bold innovations in content, style and form. Whilst this has given rise to greater critical interest, however, the focus in general has been on adult authored fiction, rather than the now growing body of work being produced and promoted by children and adolescents themselves. In effect, adult critics and reviewers either exclude or take for granted young authors’ fictions as being formulaic and/or lightweight. The purpose of this study has been to investigate the implications of this stance. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1965) theory of carnival and its associated concepts, I have conducted a comparative analysis of published fiction by adult and teenage authors whose works have been identified as subversive and/or marketed as crossover texts. A Bakhtinian perspective on style, structure and themes in each confirms, or otherwise, their radical status before consideration is given to the implications of any differences in approach. Given John Stephens’ (1999) observation that boundaries between children’s and adults’ fiction are more fundamentally blurred in the fantasy and sub-fantasy modes, the influence of genre has been investigated too. My findings indicate that radical texts with broad audience appeal can, in fact, arise through a variety of narrative forms and writing styles and regardless of authorial age. At the same time, characteristic differences in ‘perspectives’ are shown to mark off adolescent from adult authors’ works. I conclude that the young writers’ near-perspectives can produce hybrid fictions which might be understood as breaking new ground. The fresh insights this study contributes, then, demonstrate that any comprehensive account of the vibrant and ever-shifting contemporary literary scene must encompass broader and altogether more considered critical review of young adults’ input than has been offered to- date. DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is my own unaided work. It is being submitted for the degree award of PhD at the University of Bedfordshire. It has not been submitted before for any degree or examination in any other University. Chantal Oliver Signature: October 2014 DEDICATION I wish to dedicate this work to Anthony Oliver CONTENTS Abstract List of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1. Dual Audience Texts i 1.2. Assumptions of Disempowerment viii 1.3. Intertextuality: Understanding the Text xvii 1.4. A New Approach xx 1.5. Case Study: ‘Mocking God’ xxiv 1.6. The Next Step: Why and How? xxvi 1.7. Rationale: Authors and Texts xxix Chapter 2: Blurring Boundaries: Romantic/Heroic Quest Narratives in Other Worlds Fantasy Texts 2.1. Narratives of Development 1 2.2. Paradise Lost 3 2.3. Romance: Trouble in Paradise 7 2.4. Heroes or Villains?: The Unfinalized Self 17 2.5. Knowing the Self: Who am ‘I’? 29 Chapter 3: The Influence of Media: Representations of Gender, Violent Action and Death in Young Adult Dystopias 3.1. Dystopian Themes 31 3.2. Sisters are Doing it for Themselves 33 3.3. The Grotesque Innocence of Youth 40 3.4. Violence, Murder and Mayhem: All part of Growing Up 45 3.5. What’s Love got to do With It? 51 3.6. Following their own Path 55 Chapter 4: Embrace of ‘Other’ in the Hybrid Text 4.1. Crossing Over: Back to the Future 59 4.2. The Lost Child: Integration of Other 61 4.3. Re-imagining the Past 71 4.4. No Place like Home 73 4.5. Interventions of ‘Other’: Crossing Divides 77 4.6. A Womanist Perspective 80 4.7. Dynamic and Elusive Homeland 84 4.8. Problems of Return 86 Chapter 5: Making it Real: Representations of Teenage Experience in the Young Adult Realist Novel 5.1. Boys will be Boys 91 5.2. Narrative Address: Telling it ‘as it is’? 102 5.3. Who is speaking and to whom? 106 5.4. Crossing the Divide 109 5.5. On the Outside Looking In: An Alternative View 111 5.6. An ‘Other’ Life 120 Conclusion 127 Bibliography 141 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank Dr Clare Walsh for all her advice and guidance as well as her much appreciated encouragement and support Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1. Dual Audience Texts When Phillip Pullman’s book The Amber Spyglass (2000), the final novel from his trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000), appeared on the Man Booker longlist in 2001, it breached a thirty three year restriction on the inclusion of children’s texts in this award, and in doing so flagged up a widening audience and increasing interest in the whole category of children’s and young adults’ literature. The Guardian Leader (2001) proclaimed: ‘This is at best a bronze age for literary fiction, with the behemoths of yesteryear (Rushdie, Amis, Barnes) stuck in repetitive middle age. It is, however, turning into rather a golden age for children's fiction’. As if to confirm this trend, Pullman’s text, enjoyed by adults and children alike, went on to become the first children’s book to win the Whitbread Prize in 2002, a prize J. K. Rowling, the author of the phenomenally successful Harry Potter (1997-2007) series, had come close to winning in 1999 when, pre-empting the Man Booker, the Whitbread Panel permitted children’s texts to contend for the overall prize: ‘Rowling came close to unseating the Laureates Heaney and Hughes as overall winner. In the event, her third in the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the children’s category’ (Falconer, 2004: 556). Rowling’s global success with this series of books, and subsequently film adaptations, is well documented. Millions of copies have sold worldwide with translations into forty languages. But Pullman and Rowling are not isolated examples. In her study of contemporary children’s fiction and its adult readership, Rachel Falconer, for instance, notes how other ‘writers of children’s and young adult fantasy, including Eoin Colfer, Anthony Horowitz, Garth Nix, G.P. Taylor, and the pseudonymous Lemony Snicket and Lian Hearn, became bestsellers in both children’s and adult fiction markets’ (2009: 2). As the accolades and awards suggest, children’s and young adults’ literature seems to be appealing to a broader i demographic, and by ‘2002, the top thirty books on Amazon.co’s general best seller list regularly included children’s books’ (Falconer, 2004: 556), a trend which has sustained. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005-2008) of Vampire novels and Suzanne Collins’ post-apocalyptic trilogy Hunger Games (2008-2010) have been a massive hit with readers across the age range. As Sandra Beckett rightly points out, however, this is not an entirely new phenomenon; since ‘the boundaries between adult and children’s fiction were first drawn in the mid-eighteenth century, authors have been crossing them in both directions. The texts of even earlier authors, such as Charles Perrault...John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift’ and so on, have traditionally appealed to a ‘dual audience of children and adults’ (1999, xii). Helma Van Lierop-Debrauwer suggests the reason for these early examples of ‘dual readership’ authors, who wrote ‘for adults as well as children’ was mainly financial as the ‘target group of young readers was relatively small’ (1999: 3). Another significant factor was the lowly status of books aimed at children within social and literary systems. As a consequence, male authors of such texts often published their work anonymously in order to protect their identity, whilst ‘the general view was that women were closer to children and better suited to the task’ (ibid.). However, changing notions of childhood, and new educational theories and practices, combined with expanding literacy to fuel an increasing demand for books specifically for children. As a result, by the nineteenth century ‘the financial argument declined and the number of dual-readership authors went down’ (ibid.). Although as Zohar Shavit (1986), Beckett (1999) and others note the ongoing question of status saw many children’s authors continuing to attempt dual address and deny ‘any distinction between writing for adults and writing for children’ (Shavit, 1986: 41). C.S. Lewis, for instance, makes the claim that ‘No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty’ (1966: 15).