Date of Award
2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Van Tuyl, Jocelyn
Area of Concentration
English with Rhetoric and Writing
Abstract
This thesis argues that immigrant and refugee youth protagonists in Erin Entrada Kelly’s The Land of Forgotten Girls, Tae Keller’s When You Trap a Tiger, and Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad is Untrue use storytelling to navigate trauma. In recent years, prestigious youth literature awards such as the Newbery and Printz have gone to diverse books, including books depicting immigrants or refugee children that use storytelling to cope with traumas such as poverty, abuse, grief, and displacement. In Kelly and Keller’s novels, the Asian American protagonists inherit the position of the family storyteller to heal the matriarchal family unit following the death of a maternal figure. Kelly’s novel is a reverse Cinderella story, and Keller’s adapts Korean folk tales. In Nayeri’s novel, the Iranian refugee protagonist tells stories to survive socially and psychologically. Nayeri adopts storytelling techniques from Middle Eastern folk tale collection One Thousand and One Nights. The conclusion examines the function of storytelling by displaced characters and the interrogation of fairy tale adaptations by the reader as a form of pedagogy.
Recommended Citation
Conte, Alexandra, "NOT ANOTHER CINDERELLA STORY: IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE STORYTELLERS IN CONTEMPORARY YOUTH LITERATURE" (2022). Theses & ETDs. 6175.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/6175