Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: literary criticism, which leads into a brief summary of early US YA literature, before settling down to read Marie Lu's Legend (2011) and Francisco X.Stork's Marcelo in the Real World (2009) for what the authors call exceptionalism.Beyond ruminating on commonplace understandings of individualism in the USA, it is not clear why the primary texts in hand called for an Americanist genealogy, let alone this particular Americanist route through Edwards, Paine, Emerson, Eliot, Brooks, and Howe.Comparably concerning is the fact that, at times, critical keywords for understanding neoliberalism are either misunderstood or misinterpreted; in the first two chapters, for example, entrepreneurship is conflated with what the authors call 'exceptional' qualities in fictional characters (primarily intelligence, but also economic privilege), with little interest in the transactional and financial risk-taking dimensions of entrepreneurship in the actual neoliberal marketplace.Compounding these concerns, many of the close readings come across as thesisdriven, with the authors intent on telling us that what we are reading in the primary texts is evidence of neoliberalism, even when cited passages suggest otherwise.For example, in chapter 2, 'Neoliberalism's Logic of Exploitation', the authors recount a passage from Darcie Little Badger's A Snake Falls to Earth (2021), which speaks explicitly about colonisers who slaughtered bison by the millions as a way of killing off the indigenous people who needed the bison to survive and modern-day land prospectors seeking to displace later generations of those same people.Remarkably, the historical developments alluded to by Little Badger are summed up by Connors and Trites as 'the selfishness of profit-driven neoliberals' (75).Reaching such conclusions, Neoliberalism and Young Adult Fiction comes across as a study confident in recognising social injustice, but less so in recognising neoliberalism.Concerns aside, Neoliberalism and Young Adult Fiction: Exceptionalism, Exploitation, and Erasure has a handhold on popular depictions of exploitation and social injustice in YA literature, is informed by a working knowledge of major critical theories from the last several decades, and reads well as a study of engagements with exploitation and oppression in YA fiction.
Author: Chenfei Wang
Institution: Ocean University of China
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7165754860