Thesis (M.A.)--Oregon State University, 2010. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 62). Also available on the World Wide Web.

"A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Georgia Southern University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts." Title from PDF of title page (Georgia Southern University, viewed on May 1, 2010). Richard Flynn, major professor; Caren Town, Joe Pellegrino, committee members. Electronic version approved: December 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 62-66).

Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborgs universitet, 1985. / Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 263-285) and index.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of English, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-69).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-288).

Thesis (MEd (Education))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016. / Gender roles for both men and women have changed considerebly during the past two decades. These changes were caused by the New Constitution of South Africa. Women are not limited anymore to certain careers or gender roles. They can live life to their full potential as individuals. The youth are still in a variable state and are influenced by what they read. Youth literature plays a huge role in the construction of gender identity. The way gender is portrayed in youth literature contributes to the view children develop of their own gender. Gender stereotyping, sexism and sexist language in texts could be interpreted as correct and acceptable if teachers are not aware of it and do not point these out. This study was conducted to determine if Afrikaans youth literature changed in accordance to society’s views of gender roles and how youth literature plays a role in the construction of gender. For this study award-winning youth books with a female main character were chosen and were subjected to Critical Discourse Analysis. Critical Discourse Analysis exposes hidden power structures and looks critically at the language used to construct female charaters as well as who the focalizer is and how the focalizer describes the female characters. Research findings showed that there are positive changes in Afrikaans youth literature. Writers are creating stronger female characters for the youth. Research findings also show that certain stereotypes are too deeply rooted and will take more time to change. That is why it is important for the teacher in the classroom to be aware of the hidden power structures and stereotypes in youth literature and to point it out in order to teach in a more gender-sensitive way.

The aim of this diploma thesis called Three significant trends in young adult literature is to analyse this literary category in the Czech Republic; to describe the publishing houses focusing on this type of literature and to determine, if there are any trends - and if so to describe them. The first chapter states different definitions of so called YA literature and its understanding abroad and in the Czech Republic among the publishers. In the next chapter I characterise the main trends in YA literature that already exist and also those that could emerge, according to literary agents and publishers. In the next part of this thesis I describe three chosen genres: urban fantasy, fairy tale retellings and dystopian novels and I analyse four series determined as typical for respective genres: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon, The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Divergent by Veronica Roth. Each analysis is followed by the description of media response to the chosen series. The thesis also includes the interviews with editors from chosen publishing houses focusing on YA literature: Tereza Pecáková from CooBoo, Jakub Šedivý from Fragment, Lucie Kučová from Egmont and Eva Sedláčková and Jiří Štěpán from Host. This practical part is preceded by a theoretical...

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the treatment and portrayal of children in science fiction utopian literature and determine whether this effectively indicated the writers’ feminist visions for social change. A feminist theoretical perspective and critical interpretation of several of the genre’s canon, Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country, Suzy McKee Chamas’s Motherlines, Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series, were used as research methodologies. The findings revealed that children communicate feminist prescriptions for change in three ways: children as the literal, biological future, the link between two opposing societies, or the explanation for the difficult philosophies and structural elements of the societies. As this subject has been an unexplored area of criticism, it is recommended that critics begin to examine this treatment of children to more easily understand the writers’ social visions and effect their blueprints for change.

Spanning the period from the early years of the Cold War to the early twenty-first century, Crossing Out argues that medical theories of gender variance which emerge in the middle of the twentieth century are bound by the Cold-War–era discursive limits within which they were articulated, and that the ideological content of those theories persists into late-century research and treatment protocols. I parallel these analyses with interrogations of literary representations of transgendered subjects. What emerges most powerfully from this analysis of literary works is their tendency to signify in excess of the medical foreclosures, even when they seem consistent with medical discourse. By reading these two discursive systems against each other, the dissertation demonstrates the ability of literary discourse to accommodate multifaceted subject positions which medical discourse is unable to articulate. Literature thus complicates the stories that medical culture tells, revealing complex and multivariate possibilities for transgendered identification absent from traditional medical accounts. In tracing these discursive intersections the dissertation draws on and extends Michel Foucault’s theory of subjugated knowledges and Judith Butler’s writings on the formation of gendered subjects. Chapter One establishes the Cold War context, and argues that there are significant continuities between 1950s theories of intersexuality and Cold War ideology. Chapter Two extends this analysis to take in theories of transsexualism that emerged in the same years, and analyzes the discursive excesses of a 1950s pulp novel representation of a transsexual. Chapter Three establishes that the ideological content of the medical theories remained virtually unchanged by the 1990s, and argues that multivalent literary representations of transgenderism from the same decade promise the emergence of unanticipated forms of gender identity that exceed medical norms. Chapter Four is concerned with transgendered children, as they are represented in medical writing and in young adult and children’s literature. Interrogating fiction which negotiates between established medical discourse and an emergent transgender discourse, the chapter argues that these works at once invite and subvert a pathologizing understanding of gender-variant children while simultaneously providing data that demands to be read through the lens of an emergent affirmative notion of trans-childhood. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This qualitative multiple case study explores the intersection of young adult literature and adolescent memory narratives in an undergraduate course entitled Learning about Adolescence through Literature within an action research framework. This dissertation is motivated by two research questions: (1) What influence might young adult literature and memory narratives of adolescence have on undergraduate students' understandings of the cultural construction of adolescence? (2) How does the text we read affect how we perceive our lived experiences, and, in turn, how does this interchange of story affect the way in which we perceive adolescence in general? Building upon reader response theories and critical narrative pedagogy, findings indicate that YA literature and lifestory narratives can facilitate reconceptualizing previously held notions of adolescence, replacing pejorative and generalized assumptions regarding adolescence with an openness and acknowledgement of diversity. Implications for teachers and other youth workers are discussed, as well as implications for adolescents.