Epistolary Children's and Young Adult Literature (MLA Chicago 2014)
Epistolary Children's and Young Adult Literature
Children's and Young Adult literature is replete with first person narratives told through journals or letters in order to create a sense of immediacy and the semblance of truth. The narrative strategies these texts employ seek to replicate or comment ironically on the nonfictional genres of autobiography and memoir. And often readers more comfortably relate to and empathize with first person protagonists
But what are the problems of epistolary fiction? How do we interpret and analyze these structures and styles when the different modalities are becoming obsolete given our 21st-centry technological moment? This panel is sponsored by the MLA Children's Literature Division but is not guaranteed. The 2014 MLA will be held in Chicago, 9-12.
2 page abstracts to Dr. Robyn Schiffman, firstname.lastname@example.org, by March 15, 2013.