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Vampires and Witches Go to School: Contemporary Young Adult Fiction, Gender, and the Gothic

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Abstract

In the twenty-first century, the Gothic has experienced a cultural resurgence in literature, film, and television for young adult audiences. Young adult readers, poised between childhood and adulthood, have proven especially receptive to the Gothic’s themes of liminality, monstrosity, transgression, romance, and sexuality (James, 2009, p. 116). As part of the Gothic’s incorporation into a broad range of texts for young people, the school story—a conventionally realist genre—has begun to include supernatural gothic characters including vampires, witches, angels, and zombies, and has once again become a popular genre for young readers. In the past decade, in particular, a large number of Gothic young adult series with female protagonists set in boarding schools have been published (These include Shadow Falls (2011–2013) by C.C. Hunter, Covenant (2011–2013) by Jennifer L. Armentrout, House of Night (2007–2014) by P.C. Cast, Mythos Academy (2011–2014) by Jennifer Estep, The Dragonian (2013–2015) by Adrienne Woods, The Morganville Vampires (2006–2014) by Rachel Caine, Blue Bloods (2006–2013) by Melissa de la Cruz, and Fallen (2009–2012) by Lauren Kate). In this article, we will consider the first books in three such supernatural Gothic series that feature vampires and witches: Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy (2007), Claudia Gray’s vampire romance Evernight (2008) and Rachel Hawkins’ Hex Hall (2010). These books are significant for the ways in which the traditional school story is adapted and transformed by the Gothic to define models of contemporary girlhood. Although Diane Long Hoeveler suggests that “the ‘body’ that emerges from female gothic textuality is a highly gendered one” (1998, p. 18), what we see in these texts is how the school story setting enables Gothic female protagonists who are unique, disruptive, and potentially transformative, despite the limitations enforced by the heterosexual romance plot. We argue that these novels, while conservative in some respects, rework the school story genre in that they foreground the sexual and romantic desires of girl protagonists regardless of the threat they constitute to the institution and the safety of others.

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Notes

  1. Goffman explains that these features are common to a range of enclosed workplaces and residences including monasteries, concentration camps, and orphanages. The characteristics of a total institution include: (1) the conduct of life in the same location under the same authority figure; (2) an individual’s day unfolds in the presence of a large number of other people who are also required to undertake the same activities; (3) The day is rigorously scheduled by a ruling body; (4) the required activities cohere to support a unified plan that is designed to meet the institution’s aims. (Goffman, 1961, p. 6).

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Correspondence to Kristine Moruzi.

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Michelle J. Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia. One of her primary research areas is Victorian girls’ literature and culture and she is currently completing a study of female beauty titled “Beautiful Girls: Consumer Culture in British Literature and Magazines, 1850–1914”. Michelle is the author of From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (18401940) (U of Toronto P, 2018, with Clare Bradford and Kristine Moruzi) and Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 18801915 (Palgrave, 2011). She has also co-edited four books in the fields of children’s literature and Victorian literature, including Affect, Emotion and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017, with Moruzi and Elizabeth Bullen).

Kristine Moruzi is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia. She recently completed an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research fellowship on The Charitable Child: Children and Philanthropy in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (2014–2017). She is the author of Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 18501915 (Ashgate, 2012) and is co-author (with Michelle J. Smith and Clare Bradford) of From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (18401940) (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Her most recent publication is an edited collection on Affect, Emotion and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017, with Smith and Elizabeth Bullen).

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Smith, M.J., Moruzi, K. Vampires and Witches Go to School: Contemporary Young Adult Fiction, Gender, and the Gothic. Child Lit Educ 49, 6–18 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-018-9343-0

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