Writing Personal Trauma in Young Adult Fiction: Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy and Siobhan Dowd’s Solace of the Road
Keywords:
trauma, coming-of-age novel, writing trauma, young adult novel, crossover novel, Benjamin Zephaniah, Refugee Boy, Siobhan Dowd, Solace of the RoadAbstract
In recent decades, the findings of trauma studies have been used in analyzing literary texts depicting trauma. While most critical attention is devoted to so-called historical or collective trauma (such as the Holocaust) and its long-time effects on survivors, there are novels, particularly coming-of-age novels, addressing complex issues of personal trauma. Analyzing Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy (2001) and Siobhan Dowd’s Solace of the Road (2009), this paper centers on personal (individual) trauma such as loss, child abuse and/or abandonment, and on traumatic memory in connection with identity formation of a teenage protagonist. It also deals with the textual means of writing trauma and reflects on the category of young adult literature under which both novels were marketed, arguing why Zephaniah’s novel fits the category while Dowd’s can be seen as a crossover novel.
References
Boyce, Frank Cottrell. “A Wig and a Prayer.” The Guardian, March 14, 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/14/solace-of-road-siobhan-dowd.
Bubíková, Šárka. “The Literary Image of Man in the Process of Becoming: Variations of the Bildungsroman Genre in English and American Literature.” American and British Studies Annual 4 (2011): 116–130.
Carpenter, Humphrey and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Corbett, Sue. “Getting Real: Is realistic young adult fiction poised to overturn years of dystopian rule?” Publishing Weekly, May 5, 2014, 27–31.
Darlington, Sonja R. “Challenging the Canon of Adolescent Literature: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” The ALAN Review 24, no. 1 (1996): 24–27.
Dowd, Siobhan. Solace of the Road. Oxford: David Fickling Books, 2009.
Elleman, Barbara. “Publishers and Book Publishing in the United States.” In The Continuum Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, edited by Bernice E. Cullinan and Diane Goetz Person. 649–650. New York and London: Continuum, 2001.
Falconer, Rachel. “Young adult fiction and the crossover phenomenon.” In The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by David Rudd, 87–99. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.
Giller, Esther. “What is Psychological Trauma?” Sidran Institute of Traumatic Stress Education and Advocacy. 1999. Accessed April 17, 2017. https://www.sidran.org/resources/for-survivors-and-loved-ones/what-is-psychological-trauma/.
Greenlee, Adele. “Family Stories.” In The Continuum Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, edited by Bernice E. Cullinan and Diane Goetz Person, 273–275. New York and London: Continuum, 2001.
Hunt,Peter, ed. International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Kolář, Stanislav. “Introduction.” In Reflection of Trauma in Selected Works of Postwar American and British Literature, Stanislav Kolář, Zuzana Buráková and Katarína Šandorová. 5–19. Košice: Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika v Košiciach, 2010.
MacLeod, Anne Scott. American Childhood: Essays on Children‘s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.
Oliver, Jo Ellen. “‘Old’ and ‘New’ Realism in Adolescent Literature.” Journal of Reading 21, no. 4 (1978): 335–338.
Piątek, Beata. History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2014.
Segel, Elizabeth. “Realism and Children’s Literature: Notes from a Historial Perspective.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 5, no. 3 (1980): 15–18.
Schwarz, Heike. Beware of the Other Side(s):Multiple Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder in American Fiction. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2013.
Trušník, Roman. “How to Use a Bookworm: Michael Cart’s My Father’s Scar as a Crossover Novel.” In Theories in Practice: Proceedings of the First International Conference on English and American Studies, edited by Roman Trušník and Katarína Nemčoková. 178–181. Zlín: Tomas Bata University in Zlín, 2010.
Wilkie-Stibbs, Christine. The Outside Child In and Out of the Book. New York and London: Routledge, 2012.
Zephaniah, Benjamin. Refugee Boy. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001.
