Young Adult Contemporary Realistic Romance: Rhetorical and Intersectional Narratologies

This dissertation answers the guiding question how do the narrative elements of character, plot, and storyworld work together to create the young adult contemporary realistic romance (YACRR) genre? With a textset of fourteen YACRR narratives that have been published since 2010, I identify nine generic codes that occur frequently enough to be considered significant to the formulaity of the genre. Through methodologies of desire-centered research (Tuck 2009) and perpetual girlhood (Doermann 2022), I consider which type(s) of girl(s) have historically gotten to see themselves as a love interest and as desirable and how a young reader might metabolize those representations in relation to themself since identity is often shaped through cultural representations and the media provided to them. I employ rhetorical narratology, more specifically, the Rhetorical Model of Audience (Phelan 2020), because of its function in guiding the reader to find the point of the narrative. The point of YACRR narratives, I found, is that they are engaging, as all genre fiction is, but they are also pedagogical in that they provide models to young readers of what a safe and respectful relationship looks like. In this way, YACRR protagonists are both mimetic and thematic characters. Since young adult literature is mostly about first experiences and uncharted territory (Carpan 2004, 2009), being provided with healthy models of romance can help the implied reader, or the narratee, as they navigate new-to-them experiences. In order for this navigation to happen, YACRR protagonists and storyworlds are written to be ordinary so that the reader can slip themselves into the protagonist position and superimpose their own hometown in place of the storyworld in the narrative. In this way, the engagement into the narrative and the pedagogical implications can merge. A double consciousness is at play here because the narratee feels an affinity with the protagonist and the storyworld all the while knowing that they are fictional, not real. Through this work, I aim for a clearer understanding of how genres are created, identified, and understood. With this project, I seek to enter the conversation about diversity in genre fiction, which heretofore has mostly been focused on speculative genres, not romance.