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Day, Sara K., Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz, eds. Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Surrey: Ashgate, 2014.
The Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present Series "recognizes and supports innovative work on the child and on literature" that "engages with current and emerging debates in the field," according to Series Editor Claudia Nelson. Indeed, one of its recent publications, Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (edited by Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz), engages with one of the more visible and recent trends in young adult literature-dystopian fiction-and offers a new critical paradigm through which we can interpret such texts-liminality and girlhood. The eleven essays in this collection argue that the liminal spaces of young adult womanhood correlate to the liminal spaces of dystopian society and allow for "an explicit exploration of the rebellious girl protagonist, a figure who directly contradicts the common perception that girls are too young or too powerless to question the limitations placed upon them, much less to rebel and, in turn, fuel larger rebellions" (4). The collection smartly shows the ways in which "young women in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century dystopian fiction embody liminality, straddling the lines of childhood and adulthood, of individuality and conformity, of empowerment and passivity" (4).
The editors navigate this important conversation by situating the eleven essays across three parts: Reflections and Reconsiderations of Rebellious Girlhood, Forms and Signs of Rebellion, and Contexts and Communities of Rebellion. This organizational framework is hugely important to the success of this collection and allows the essays to speak to one another and not be limited only by thematic content. It would be quite easy for a project of this nature to result in loosely connected essays that share nothing more than...