EN 638

Youth Canadian Fiction

This course offers a critical genealogy of youth; we study how youth identity is shaped by historical context and we explore the governing scripts for youth subjectivity in Canadian literature from the end of the 19th century to the present. We analyze juvenile, YA and adult literature alongside a social history of Canadian youth and we will draw on feminist, structural, and aesthetic theories of Bildung to help us consider how the traits and developmental trajectories of our literary protagonists have been conceptualized in relation to the development of the nation.