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Literary Conceptualizations of Growth. By Roberta Seelinger Trites. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014.
Reviewed by Holly Blackford
Roberta Trites's new book continues her concern with the fact that adolescent literature uniquely seeks to eradicate its own subject and target audience. However, I did not realize this continuity with her prior work until I reached the end of chapter 6, "The Hegemony of Growth in Adolescent Literature." In her concluding sentence, she asks: "Do those of us in childhood studies ever want to write about childhood and adolescence employing metaphors that effectively entail youth as negative, as something to be outgrown?" (145). Trites's book represents, I believe, an introductory view of cognitive narratology, as illustrated by adolescent literature. The book's structure departs from the usual method of our field; it moves from general to specific, from overview to argument, and from cognitive psychology to literature as example of cognitive principle. My sense is that the publication series, Children's Literature, Culture, and Cognition, seeks to reach a general audience and introduce it to literary concepts that are quite familiar to practicing critics. The series' goal is to present interdisciplinary research in multiple linguistic areas for an international audience. Trites's book has a lecture-like feel and briefly uses works of literature as examples and illustrations of general concepts. I found myself thinking that its overarching thesis seems to be that literature operates with a similar method to that of human consciousness. Trites uses this correspondence to interrogate some of the major concepts that we blindly accept as critics of children's and adolescent literature.
The book is a broad-brush view of the inescapable metaphor of growth in the novel, in critical accounts of literature, and in philosophy. The project involves Trites in taking a step back from close reading to a larger, general view of how literature fits into the...