Abstract
Though portrayals of bullying in children’s books stretch back to Victorian public school stories, this article sees a new subgenre about bullying in young adult novels emerging in the post-Columbine years. Selected works by Jerry Spinelli, Walter Dean Myers, Jaime Adoff, Carol Plum-Ucci and Rita Williams-Garcia are examined, although the article begins by looking at a precursor of this subgenre, Robert Cormier’s classic The Chocolate War. In this subgenre, it is argued that bullying is not presented as dysfunctional adolescent behavior, but as a tool for addressing issues of difference and discrimination on the grounds of race, class, sexual orientation or personality; issues that filter into adolescent culture. High schools are thus portrayed as totalitarian microcosms where bullying functions as a means of social control, curbing deviance from masculine, heterosexual, middle-class and white norms. The narrative techniques and themes of these books—around homophobia, jock culture, rampage shootings and girl-on–girl violence—will be examined.
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Notes
Class as a cause of bullying features prominently in Alexandra Flinn’s novel Breaking Point (2002), where David Blanco and Paul Richmond, two subsidised students, are the outcasts in their prep school.
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Acknowledgments
This research was conducted at the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University, thanks to a José Castillejo grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. I would like to express my gratitude to both institutions, and, in particular, to Prof. Jerry Griswold, the former Director of the Center, for his help and support. I would also like to thank Prof. Alida Allison and Michael Cart, who provided valuable suggestions during the early stages of this paper.
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Lourdes Lopez-Ropero is an Associate Professor in the English Department of the University of Alicante, where she teaches Contemporary Literature in English and Children’s Literature. She holds an MA from the University of Kansas, and a PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her main fields of research are Postcolonial Literature and Children’s/YAL. Her most recent publication in the latter field is “‘Trust them to Figure it Out’: Toni Morrison’s Books for Children”. Atlantis 30.2 (2008): 43–57, recently quoted in the MELUS special issue on Toni Morrison.
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Lopez-Ropero, L. ‘You are a Flaw in the Pattern’: Difference, Autonomy and Bullying in YA Fiction. Child Lit Educ 43, 145–157 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-011-9145-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-011-9145-0