Tracing the development from ‘Robinsonnades’ to imperialist ‘adventure’ fiction for ‘boys’ and ‘girls’, we will survey serialized texts and excerpts from well-known 19th-century novels in dialogue with key studies on Empire in Victorian literature. The main focus of the course, however, will be on the relation of newer ‘young adult fiction’ to the legacies of both colonial writing and postcolonial critique. We will analyze how Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch (2011) and Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone (2018) use the perilous journeys of their protagonists on a quest to save magical realms as a means to ‘write back’ to Eurocentric male-centred adventure and fantasy genres. Yet, these novels also transgress the postcolonial ‘writing back’-paradigm, against the background of which we will examine the cultural work of recent YAL in global circulation. In a second survey of excerpts from a wider range of novels and short stories from different cultural contexts, we will test their respective genre(s) and modes of conveying youth narrators’ voices.
