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Part One: Genre Templates and Transformations
- University of Nebraska Press
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Author { 1 part one { Genre Templates and Transformations Part 1 takes on the large matter of genre as a narrative consideration in children’s and young adult literature. The opening essay by Elisabeth Rose Gruner examines how the overt and covert fairy-tale structures used in young adult realism and fantasy for girls continue to attempt to offer models of behavior for a young readership. In “Telling Old Tales Newly: Intertextuality in Young Adult Fiction for Girls,” Gruner discusses how the structures of fairy tales offer revealing limits for protagonists as well as reader resistance to particular moral positions. Following this essay, Danielle Russell’s “Familiarity Breeds a Following: Transcending the Formulaic in the Snicket Series” turns to Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events in order to examine the ways that Snicket (Handler) toys with and blends various narrative forms as found in different genres, including the gothic tale, the series tale, and mystery, and ultimately both blends and expands what is possible in children’s literature as a moral vehicle for readers. Morality and form—especially fairy tale and the role of the narrator—connect the first two genre studies ; Chris McGee’s “The Power of Secrets: Backwards Construction and the Children’s Detective Story” connects with Danielle Russell’s essay as it examines in the genre of children’s mystery the role of childhood innocence (as exemplified by character) and plotting, especially the role of the ending. 2 } Title The three essays in this part, while directly taking on the question of genre, foreground concerns that are common and recurring issues in this collection: the nature of the implied reader of children’s and young adult literatures, the use of narrative closure, writerly/readerly texts (or, respectively, texts unformulated by convention and those texts that are clear conventional products for consumption), the assumptions made about intertextuality, and the attendant ethical or moral implications of all these dimensions of the experience of reading literature for children and young adults. ...