Introducing Dis/narrative: A study of disability as subtext in contemporary crossover young adult literature

This thesis presents a new theoretical framework for understanding disability in literature, entitled the ‘Dis/narrative Framework’, with a particular focus on young adult crossover literature. For the past three decades, the field of disability studies has emerged as a rapidly evolving discipline that has sought to recontextualise how we understand and define ailment in medical, social, and cultural terms. Independently, the authoring and subsequent study of crossover literature, or the texts that bridge a number of broad age categories, have also risen to prominence. Despite these two movements developing in parallel with one another, there exists a notable gap in the corpus of scholarly work that demonstrates how many of the themes and structures that are inherent within crossover literature fundamentally construct and support an interpretation of certain texts where disability becomes discernible on a subtextual and elided level. Disability studies critics are quick to point out the failings of fiction that explicitly depicts characters with disabilities as one-dimensional, where the presence of disability demands that the narrative morph around it. This stands in contrast to critics within children’s studies, who often praise the presence of disability so long as it promotes pedagogic ideals of inclusion, empathy, and representation. This thesis seeks to address both fields in tandem with one another, and presents alternative close readings of a number of crossover texts with the aim of elevating how we interpret disability beyond explicit and clinically defined portrayals. In doing so, an emergent corpus of literature emerges that evokes disability through subtext and the implicit. The dis/narrative approach is further divided into two broad methodologies. The first of these, the ‘Thematic Dis/narrative’ approach, highlights thematic elements common in crossover literature that intersect with critical understandings of disability under the social and cultural models. These themes include isolation, liminality, pity, empathy, and interdependency. The texts chosen for close reading within this study that exemplify these themes are Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (2005-2009), Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series (2001-2012), and T.J. Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea (2020). The second dis/narrative methodological strand, the ‘Structural Dis/narrative’ approach, analyses how certain narrative structures native to crossover and young adult literature orient the characters within as occupying a positionality of implicit disablement, both to the world around them, as well as to the reader. This reading of disability as being implicitly present within certain forms of narrative structure is rooted in two-world domestic and urban fantasy storyworlds. These settings present unique interpretations of agency and mobility with regards to liminal space, allegories of diagnosis and disability acquisition, and the positionality of normalcy (and thus, counter-normalcy) within their respective settings. The texts that are discussed under a structural dis/narrative reading within this thesis are Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002) and Neverwhere (1996). It is not the intention of this thesis to undermine, replace, or deconstruct traditional interpretations of explicit disability in literature, but rather to introduce a new way of engaging with disability in literature that is founded upon the core values of three different, and at times, estranged, critical disciplines: disability studies, children’s studies, and literary studies. In doing so, this research hopes to encourage further academic discussion and engagement, with the hopes of encouraging readings and interpretations of otherwise overlooked and underappreciated texts within the ongoing discourse surrounding disability in literature.

Publisher

University of Galway

Rights

CC BY-NC-ND

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University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)