Young Saviors and Agents of Change: Power, Environment, and Girlhood in Contemporary Finnish Young Adult Dystopias

The article examines the child savior motif in four contemporary Finnish young adult (YA) dystopias. The major topics discussed are political agency, environment, and fairy tale intertextuality in these works, which are connected to the northern ideal of children and adolescents as subjects able to affect their own lives. Contemporary Finnish YA dystopian literature does not portray Finland as a societal utopia but, rather, as a society in which social welfare and the general well-being of citizens have collapsed as a result of ecological disasters, continuous wars, totalitarian regimes, or the repression of minorities. Although the problems contemporary Finnish YA dystopias depict are often global, the novels still ground their ethics on northern conceptualizations of the welfare state and the unquestionable ideal of equality.