University of Cambridge
Scribbling Girls, Becoming Writers: A Speculative Mapping of Girl Writer Characters in Classic and Contemporary Adolescent Fiction
Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis dissertation offers an innovative reading approach towards critical conceptualisations of girl writer characters and their writing practices in classic and contemporary adolescent fiction. While novels about female artistic growth are often defined by developmental narrative frameworks, epitomised by the structures of the *Bildungsroman* and the *Künstlerroman*, my project identifies the process-oriented, embodied, and nomadic nature of writing as an act that brings about the writer’s “becoming.” By drawing on Deleuze- Guattarian concepts of art, literature, and nomadism, and by considering questions of embodiment through strands of materialist thought predicated upon becoming, my reading method imagines the girl writer as a nomadic subject whose complex writing processes can be captured if we embrace the nonlinear potential of texts, rather than their closure. Combining classic and current YA novels in each analysis, my text selection further reflects my rejection of period teleology in favour of commonalities and connections between past and present representations of girls’ authorship. The dissertation is comprised of three chapters. Chapter One contends that the formal characteristics of the diary mode disrupt traditional narrative teleologies in novels featuring the girl writer, inviting attention to the processual nature of writing as it is depicted, including its attendant fragmentations, temporal gaps, and seriality. The second chapter addresses the dilemma girl characters face when claiming an identity as a poet. Invoking the term “becoming-poetic,” I unpack how the protagonists’ engagement with poetic forms allows them to experience writing as a series of ongoing (re)formulations, negotiations, and transformations. The third and final chapter theorises fanfiction, or fan-based creative practices, as minor literature, arguing that by identifying the “minoritarian” writing strategies depicted in novels about adolescent female authorship, we might better understand how these books express the affirmative potential of young women’s creative agency. I conclude by drawing from young people’s writing practices in real-world contexts. Addressing the changing meaning of writing in the contemporary landscape, I illustrate the implications of my reading approach to future analyses concerning young women as writers, both in and outside of fiction.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2023
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Du, Yan
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Sanders, Joe Sutliff
Subjects
dc:subject × 6Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.105480
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/363393