Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, EDU Teaching and Learning

This study is a text-based analysis of the use of the diary form in young adult literature about young women. Drawing upon rhetorical narrative theory, which views narrative as an action in which an author makes particular choices concerning various narrative resources in order to communicate to a reader for a particular purpose, I analyze how authors draw upon the form of the diary as one such narrative resource. My work focuses on various commercially successful and/or critically acclaimed works of YA literature from across time: Go Ask Alice (1971), Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging (1999), Becoming Me (2000), Gabi, A Girl in Pieces (2014), and Popular, A Memoir (2014). In my study, I identify how understandings of the diary as a literary form and a cultural phenomenon inform how it is used to structure works of YA literature. One such understanding of the diary—that it is a form associated with adolescent girls—leads to a second focus within my research. Informed by an understanding of adolescence and of girlhood as culturally constructed concepts, I interrogate how adolescent girlhood is portrayed in the books within my study through their content, their conceptualization of the diarist-narrator, and their construction of the implied youth reader. In each of my chapters, I identify one use of the diary form—as didactic tool, as regulatory device, as form of counter-storytelling, and as neutral vehicle for truth—and consider how that use connects to a larger conceptualization of adolescent girlhood. Across my chapters, I attend to the ways in which young women are frequently positioned as protagonists and as readers as less capable than adults, reifying traditional understandings of power and adolescence. In so doing, this research not only adds to the growing body of work that critically examines literary form in youth literature but also builds upon and extends cross-disciplinary scholarship on how young people are positioned in literature and cultur (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michelle Ann Abate (Advisor); Caroline Clark (Advisor); James Phelan (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Education; Gender; Language Arts; Literature; Womens Studies