This interdisciplinary study examines the relationship between violence, empowerment, and the teenage super/heroine in comics and young adult fantasy novels. The author analyzes stories of teenage super/heroines who have experienced trauma, abduction, assault, and sexual violence that has led to a loss of agency, and then tracks the way that their use of violence empowers them to reclaim agency over their lives and bodies. The author identifies these characters as vigilante feminist teenage super/heroines because they become vigilantes in order to protect other girls and young women from violence and create safer communities. The teenage super/heroines examined in this book are characters who have the ability—through super power, or supernatural and magical ability—to fight back against those who seek to cause them harm. They are a product of and a response to both the pervasive culture of violence against girls and women and a system that fails to protect girls and women from harm. While this book is part of a robust intellectual conversation about the role of girls and women in popular literature and culture and about feminist analyses of comics and YA literature, it is unique in its reading of violence as empowerment and in its careful tracing—and naming—of the teenage vigilante super/heroine, a characterization that is hugely popular and deserves this close reading.

This book examines the narratives of series heroines that preceded and followed Nancy Drew, each in relation to their social, historical, and economic environments. Covering heroines including Miss Pickerell, Madge Sterling, and Polly the Powers Model, among others, this book illustrates that the recovery of stolen inheritances during the Great Depression serves different social ends than, for example, fighting Germans on an international stage. This book expands scholarship that tends to focus on Nancy Drew by drawing attention to the stories of some other “lost” heroines of twentieth century U.S. series fiction. Organized by time period, the chapters give insight into the cultural landscape that perpetuated the popularity of these heroines in their respective eras, how these series reflected the experiences of readers across the decades, and their continued impact well into the twenty-first century.

Growing up in Latin America contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the representation of children and minors in contemporary Latin American literature and film. This volume looks closely at the question of agency and the role of minors as active participants in the complex historical processes of the Latin American continent during the 20th and 21st centuries, both as national citizens and as transnational migrants. Questions of gender, migration, violence, post-coloniality, and precarity are central to the analysis of childhood and youth narratives in this collection of essays.

This collection examines the child’s role in contemporary post-apocalyptic films and television.. By exploring the function of child characters within a dystopian framework, this volume illustrates how traditional notions of childhood are tethered to sites of adult conflict and disaster, a connection that often works to reaffirm the “rightness” of past systems of social order.

Since Columbine, the topic of school shootings has become ever more prevalent in the media, in research, and in fiction. This book provides analyses of several Young Adult (YA) texts about school shootings and uncovers how the authors represent such violence (and those who perpetrate it) while developing stories that effectively speak to their adolescent readers. Employing Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, Laura A. Brown examines how the texts frame particular settings and events as important to the development of young people as a way of accounting for the shootings. Likewise, psychologist Peter Langman’s classification of the three populations of school shooters is utilized as a framework to analyze the characterization of fictional shooters in the texts. The author argues that these texts, while not easy to read, are important, as they problematize the ways we think about, approach, and react to school shootings and the students who commit such acts.

This collection approaches the deconstruction of American "childhood" from a wide variety of critical, interdisciplinary lenses and gestures toward the construction of a more realistic, twenty-first century definition of "childhood"--one which is defined by the real-life struggles of childhood and not by romanticized notions of "innocence."

This is my declaration of intent, so that no one will have any doubt as to why I assumed the persona of The REAPER. Originally, my mission was only about revenge. A monster attacked my home and destroyed my family and the law was too weak to punish him. Therefore, I became the instrument of revenge. I became Nemesis incarnate. However, that monster is gone...so why do I remain? There are still forces at work in our city that see themselves above the law. The police and lawyers are bound by the law of the land while the criminals are not. They prey upon the weak and timid while the politicians argue. How can I stand by silently knowing that I have the skills to intervene? I cannot. I still believe in lex talionis. The law of retribution. An eye for an eye. Equal punishment under the law. Call it Vigilante Justice if you will. So reads the REAPER'S Manifesto. When a new designer drug called Oblivion sweeps across Sanctuary like a plague, Erik is forced to once again don his mask and take up his weapons to avenge the wrongs inflicted on those close to him. Will the Reaper be up to the challenge?