Studies in the Novel
Due Date: 11-01-2021
Studies in the Novel seeks submissions for its forthcoming special issue Indigenous Young Adult Novels, guest-edited by Christopher Pexa (Univ. of Minnesota), Angela Calcaterra (Univ. of North Texas), and Eric Gary Anderson (George Mason Univ.), to be published summer 2022.
Indigenous authors have been telling stories and writing books for young audiences for a very long time. From oral literatures that enthralled Indigenous youths gathered around the fire; to early written work by Charles Alexander Eastman, Zitkála-Šá, Francis La Flesche, and Luther Standing Bear; to more recent YA texts, including Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House, Stephen Graham Jones’s Mapping the Interior, Dawn Quigley’s Apple in the Middle, Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer, and Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel’s Wabanaki Blues, Indigenous authors have captivated young and adult audiences alike with stories that feature young protagonists, coming-of-age plots, and crucial insights about being and becoming in an often hostile world. Publications, including Mandy Suhr-Sytsma’s Self-Determined Stories (2019) and Debbie Reese’s “American Indians in Children’s Literature” website, have highlighted the long-standing significance of Native YA literatures for Indigenous communities. Despite this important work, however, scholarship largely has not kept up with the proliferation of Indigenous YA literature in the past few decades in particular. In this special issue, we seek a timely intervention with a body of essays that examine Indigenous YA novels both in their own right and in conversation with the conventions of settler YA fiction more broadly. In particular, we ask, how does Indigenous young adult fiction address sovereignty, community, resistance, futurity, desire, fear, dreams? How do Indigenous authors engage and revise settler YA conventions?
See www.studiesinthenovel.org for the full call; send questions and submissions to studiesinthenovel@unt.edu. Deadline: 1 November 2021.