An Embodied Challenge to Femininity as Disciplinary Power in the Contemporary American Young Adult Sports Novels

The goal of this paper is to investigate the role of disciplinary power regimes of femininity in sporting institutions depicted in sports fiction. With a renewed interest in analyzing sports practices as specifically gendered, this paper addresses how contemporary narratives’ deeper address of the affective encounters of characters has reconfigured the sports literary panorama. As represented in Miranda Kenneally’s novel, Coming Up for Air (2017), friendship poses a challenge to the institutionalized, parental and gendered bodily vulnerability of sports. The analysis reveals how the adolescent body is manageable but can also contest, in direct questioning of the interests of authority. Enjoying friendship in sports, eventually, reveals paths towards more inclusive (bodily) practices in them. Finally, this paper speaks of the fact that juvenile fiction, traditionally considered an archive of negative influence on young readers’ behaviors, can exercise the opposite effect too. Article received: December 28, 2018; Article accepted: January 23, 2019; Published online: April 15, 2019; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Riestra-Camacho, Rocío. "An Embodied Challenge to Femininity as Disciplinary Power in the Contemporary American Young Adult Sports Novels." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 18 (2019): 65–77. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i18.295

The One Constant: The Literature of Nostalgia and Catharsis in Postwar Japanese Baseball Fiction

Chapter 4 describes the venerable tradition of baseball fiction in the latter half of the Shōwa period and in the early Heisei period (1989-), an era in which baseball emerged as a true sport of the masses and in which Japan’s economic success paralleled the emergence of professional baseball as Japan’s national pastime. This chapter explores the emergence of several important trends in baseball literature including the appearance of the first examples of baseball mystery literature and the continuation of juvenile fiction about baseball. This latter literary category developed from the body of writing aimed at young readers that had been initiated by Akai tori (Red Bird) and other magazines that made an appearance in the Taishō period (1912-1926), and as baseball was resuscitated and gained popularity in the postwar period, it again emerged as a natural topic for juvenile fiction. While the juvenile baseball fiction of the Occupation Era was cathartic and was intended to help young readers grapple with the harsh realities of the postwar era, the baseball fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, often set in the immediate postwar era, tended to be more nostalgic, portraying baseball as a refuge and source of hope in a time of uncertainty.

Juvenile Fiction

This chapter focuses on the juvenile fiction of the British settler colonies to 1950, and considers how writers both take up forms familiar to them from British literature and revise these forms in the attempt to account for the specific geography, politics, and cultures of their places. It is during this time that the heroics associated with building the empire had taken hold of British cultural and literary imaginations. Repeatedly, the juvenile fiction of settler colonies returns to the question of the relations between settlers and Indigenous inhabitants—sometimes respecting the power of Indigenous knowledge and traditions; often expressing the conviction of natural British superiority to Indigenous ways of knowing and living; always revealing, whether overtly or covertly, the haunting of the stories of settler cultures by the displacement of Indigenous peoples on whose land those cultures are founded.

Is “E” really for everybody? Picture books for older readers in public libraries

Picture books for older readers present challenges for libraries in terms of how best to provide access to them. These books often have an “E” on the spine to indicate that they are “easy” or for “everybody,” and share lower shelves with a far greater number of picture books geared for the preschool and primary grade audience. However, this classification by format might encourage older readers to pass over these materials. At the same time, questions remain about the effectiveness of housing these picture books with juvenile fiction, or of creating separate collections. This article looks at how the picture book as a format and picture book collections are defined, as well as the variety of ways in which a small sample of picture books for older readers are currently being managed in public libraries.

Building the Spanish Juvenile Fiction Collection at the University of Alberta’s HT Coutts Education Library

This article describes why and how the University of Alberta Libraries built a Spanish language children’s literature collection. Selection criteria, findability, visibility, and assessment are addressed in the context of this collection. Practical information is provided to help librarians build similar collections and promote them.

Space Cadets and Rocket Boys

After World War II, science-fiction authors found lucrative side gigs in writing fiction for young people. Before “young adult” books were a fixed category, authors like Robert Heinlein wrote stories about space for middle-grade readers, most of whom were male. This chapter looks at Heinlein’s juvenile fiction published by Scribner’s, and shows how his work reinforced a vision of scientific masculinity.