Abstract
The twenty-first century has seen a marked increase in the gothic themes of liminality, monstrosity, transgression, romance, and sexuality in fiction for young adults. This chapter examines how gothic traditions are repurposed and reconfigured for young people, with a focus on how the gender of the protagonist impacts upon the narrative. We consider two vampire novels with human female narrators and two novels with somewhat monstrous male narrators (one a zombie and the other a young Victor Frankenstein) to examine how the genre remains preoccupied with the patriarchal threat posed to young women while simultaneously attempting to understand and humanise the monster.
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Smith, M.J., Moruzi, K. (2020). Gender and Sexuality in Young Adult Fiction. In: Bloom, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_36
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