Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction ed. by Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz (review)

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 similar topics; however, the editors should be recognized for their outstanding work, particularly in Parts I and II, which creates a new framework for future scholarship on rebellion, girlhood, and dystopian literature.

Part I, made up of four essays, lays the foundation for a conversation on how dystopian narratives comment on real-world constructions of girlhood and adolescence, through a commonality of liminal spaces, both shaped by and shaping turn-of-the-twenty-first century cultural events. Ranging from Girl Power movements to the gender gap in STEM fields, this foregrounding works especially well, asserting how dystopian novels intersect with and speak to contemporary adolescence. While the essays in this section themselves lack a cohesive unification, the editors group these arguments by stating that “novels set in distant dystopian futures intersect and interrogate facets of contemporary adolescent womanhood” (11). Thus, the authors in Part I are able to cover a wide array of facets, which allows readers to imagine other ways the contemporary cultural landscape may intersect with these texts. Sonya Sawyer Fritz’s “Girl Power and Girl Activism in the Fiction of Suzanne Collins, Scott Westerfeld, and Moira Young” appropriately opens the collection, offering an engaging and exciting explanation of the recent popularity of dystopian texts and, more specifically, dystopian texts with strong female protagonists; she asserts that such texts and characters are a direct reflection and manifestation of the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s and the rise of girl activism. In this way, the collection engages a true cultural studies meditation on the sociopolitical relevance of young adult dystopian texts in relation to young womanhood.

The four essays in Part II, Forms and Signs of Rebellion, expand upon Part I’s foundation of how the recent popularity of dystopian texts correlate to a specific social and cultural landscape of girlhood beginning in the 1990s and examine how that informs the nature of rebellion featured in these novels. While the dystopian landscapes of the novels are not examined in a similar late-twentieth century sociopolitical context per se, the agency of the female protagonists, as is the shape of their rebellions, is particularly in relation to the body. In that way, the editorial framing allows the...