For example, an astonishing number of their teen protagonists conceive the very first time they have intercourse, and not only in more conservative novels like Louise Plummer’s Indeed, although pregnancy and parenting novels have changed significantly over the past 35 years, with more girls keeping and raising their babies (and often making the honor roll to boot), they are still very much cautionary tales about the dangers of teen sexual activity. Here, the compulsion to honor adolescent readers’ diverse family relationships-and to tell the truth about the variety of their lived experience-conflicts with the presumed didactic function of such literature, a presumption that is especially keen in a decade when alarm over teen sexual behavior has prompted a nearly 2500% increase in public funding for abstinence-only sex education While the affirmation of nontraditional families may be a hallmark of much contemporary YA fiction, it is particularly complicated in the case of one popular subgenre: the teen pregnancy and parenting novel. From Basketball to Barney: Teen Fatherhood, Didacticism, and the Literary in YA Fiction
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |