Empire and Adolescence: Whiteness and Gendered Citizenship in American Young Adult Literature, 1904-1951

Abstract

his dissertation examines how American adolescent literary book lists and adolescent literature normalized White Anglo-Saxon Protestant subjectivities in the first half of the twentieth century. Figures like child study psychologist G. Stanley Hall and librarian Anne Carroll Moore created a gendered and racialized reading practice for American teens that would construct a functioning imperialist citizenry whereas teen authors Mary MacLane and Maureen Daly provided contesting (and occasionally colluding) models of adolescent reading. The introduction argues that early discourses around adolescent reading practices must be contextualized against American imperialist and military action to better deconstruct racialized images of adolescent citizenry. The first chapter examines how Hall’s literary genre for teens, “ephebic literature,” provided a new cultural model of adolescent development that pulled together stories from Greek mythology, medieval legends, and Western biography to imagine a model of imperialist citizenship bounded by race and gender. The second chapter proposes a revised stance on Moore’s career that both recognizes her contributions to increasing dialogue between librarians and their adolescent patrons and calls attention her post-WWI recommendations for teens, which did not reflect the ethnic and racial diversity that marked the New York Public Library’s patrons but relied instead on Western European and American literature that marginalized nonwhite or immigrant characters. The third chapter juxtaposes two case studies, one historical and one fictional, of two white adolescent “New Women” whose obsessive reading was framed as dangerous to nationalist goals. The first re-reads Mary MacLane’s memoir as an adolescent expression of fandom, one that intertwined plotlines from girl’s bildungsroman with the tenants of lyric poetry to create queer futurities and communities; the second returns to Moore’s recommendations for girls to articulate how her condemnation of Fanny Kilbourne’s Betty Bell was bound up in white respectability politics. The fourth chapter reframes Maureen Daly’s extensive career writing to and for teens into a complicated performance of a commercialized WASP subjectivity that marginalized her own Irish-Catholic background during and after WWII. This dissertation calls for young adult literary studies to examine these historical developments to better contextualize current problems increasing diversity in young adult literature.