Abstract
In her 2017 collection of poems, the princess saves herself in this one, Amanda Lovelace craftsstories about fairytale princesses, fair damsels, and powerful queens. However, Lovelace weaves these stories together with the common thread of trauma, using the masks of these characters to process her experiences through a critical distance from that trauma. With narratives like these, Lovelace and other Young Adult (YA) authors, like Laurie Halse Anderson and Stephen Chbosky, demonstrate transformative literatures, where their narrators undergo a massive change in emotional and mental states, to effect a form of therapy and advocacy that create a community of active bystanders from its readers. I argue that Lovelace’s work plays on the expectations of common fairytale tropes to process her traumas through poetry, and once her transformation is complete, directly addresses the reader and calls for them to find their own paths to growth. Next, I argue that Anderson’s narrator, Melinda, follows a similar path to transformation as Lovelace, but her advocacy is found both within the novel and in the impact that it had on its readers. Finally, I argue that Chbosky uses his narrator, Charlie, to understand trauma as it is remembered, and uses the story to advocate beyond the pages of
the novel. By reading YA transformative literature writers, such as Lovelace, Anderson, and Chbosky, through this lens of trauma studies, we expand the growing critical discourse around YA literature to position trauma in transformative literature as an opportunity for advocacy, understanding, and shared coping for traumas that affect writers and readers in the real world.