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“Her knowledge of flora and fauna came mostly from fiction" : the adolescent as green subject in three Canadian young adult novels

University of British Columbia

Using the lens of ecocriticism, this thesis focuses on the literary portrayal of nature in three contemporary realistic Canadian young adult novels: Mistik Lake by Martha Brooks, The Lightkeeper’s Daughter by Iain Lawrence, and The Uninvited by Tim Wynne-Jones. Ecocriticism—the critical and political inquiry into the discourses influencing our ideas of nature—questions our understanding of and relationship to the environment and to ecological concerns as portrayed in literary texts. As such, this research takes a green cultural-studies approach and draws upon sources from environmentalist criticism and literary studies to investigate the ways in which the three novels characterize the natural world, the quality of the relationship between the adolescent and nature, and how this relationship might influence readers’ attitudes toward the environment. The resultant explication describes the ways the narratives construct the natural world and produce the adolescent as green subject and provides insight into the young adult’s indeterminate and ambiguous relationship to the natural world.

Text

2012-08-09

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/42893

Children's Literature

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/