| Summary: | <p>This thesis examines how a revised version of the coming-of-age narrative has emerged in a range of contemporary novels, which offer feminist revisions of American girlhood through formal, thematic, and ideological departures from the traditional gendered narrative conventions of adolescence. Through this examination, this thesis argues that the American girl has been transformed from a flat aesthetic object in earlier iterations of the coming-of-age narrative, to a dynamic socio-political subject whose narrative centres upon the promotion of a range of feminist agendas in the contemporary novel.</p>
<p>The coming-of-age narrative has chiefly explored the development of adolescent boys, charting their ‘growing up’ into a world of masculine dominance and opportunity as they mature into men. In opposition to the expansive worlds of their male counterparts, girls’ coming-of-age narratives have routinely depicted an experience of ‘growing down’ into future womanhood, where the maturation from girl to woman charts a protagonist’s personal diminishment. In this story of the female coming-of-age experience, girls learn nothing more than how to acquiesce to the normative dictates governing gender identity. </p>
<p>However, this thesis argues that contemporary literature foregrounds new visions of American girlhood that explicitly destabilise the constricting conventions of the coming-of-age narrative. As a result of this generic reconfiguration, this thesis examines how the coming-of-age narrative has shifted from being an essentially conservative form that predominantly focused on the narratives of middle-class, white, heterosexual girls, to instead being used as a cultural vehicle to expand understandings of girlhood as an identity that is shaped by questions of gender, sexuality, race, disability, class, and religion in the post-1990 era.</p>
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