Depictions of mental illness and recovery in twenty-first century young adult fiction

This thesis is concerned with the proliferation of young adult novels about mental health and illness produced within the twenty-first century: a literary explosion which coincided with a wider public and critical interest in adolescent fiction more generally. This is a vital time for young adult literature as it has only recently begun to be recognized both as an increasingly popular genre of fiction with evolving readerships, and a rich site for academic scholarship.
Across three main chapters, it tracks newly formed, constantly evolving voices of mentally ill adolescents. It examines how factors such as experiencing symptoms of mental illness, articulation of such symptoms, and help-seeking behaviours are shaped by other forms of identity politics including gender and sexuality. It attends to the complexities encountered when holding the first and second decade of the twenty-first century as positions on a broad spectrum of fictionalized portrayals of lived experiences of mental illness, whilst demonstrating that literature published in each decade produces a range of sophistications and double movements. Nevertheless, the thesis identifies a trajectory of desired inclusion in which the selected fiction becomes less reliant upon static and linear binaries of illness / restitution and narrow and adult-centred scripts of recovery as the twenty-first century moves on.
This thesis explores how young adult literature moves towards agentic constructions of mentally ill subjectivities which produce fiction that pushes the boundaries of the genre beyond the grounded clinical locations outlined as problematic early in the thesis. It discusses how the first decade of the twenty-first century produced fictionalized forms of restitution which require strict assimilation into predetermined patterns of gendered behaviour and power structures which limit adolescents’ power over their illnesses, bodies, and recovery. As the thesis progresses, it focuses upon how more recent contributions to the growing body of work challenge naturalistic modes of expression. Such fiction opens possibilities that construct innovative worlds in which mental illness is accommodated, and animated in nuanced formations.