Unpacking ‘something dark’: Narrating Southern female adolescence in Jill McCorkle’s The Cheer Leader, Sylvia Wilkinson’s Bone of my Bones and Thulani Davis’s 1959

McLennan, Rachael (2006) Unpacking ‘something dark’: Narrating Southern female adolescence in Jill McCorkle’s The Cheer Leader, Sylvia Wilkinson’s Bone of my Bones and Thulani Davis’s 1959. European Journal of American Culture, 25 (2). pp. 139-152.

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Abstract

This article explores the role the concept of adolescence plays in the critical work of the Southern writer Jill McCorkle. It finds that difficulties in defining adolescence are caused by, and cause, close relations between adolescence and metaphor. Examination of how McCorkle figures adolescence is brought to bear on her own first novel, The Cheer Leader (1984), Thulani Davis's 1959 (1992) and Sylvia Wilkinson's Bone of My Bones (1982) to argue that in these texts, narrating the experience of female adolescence in the American South involves signifying on the South (through narrative acts of metaphorical unpacking) in order to relocate the narrators within South(s), which they endeavour to revise.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: american literature,female adolescence,the american south,metaphor,identity,narration
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > American Studies
Depositing User: Sarah Burbidge
Date Deposited: 24 May 2011 15:37
Last Modified: 26 Mar 2024 09:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/31319
DOI: 10.1386/ejac.25.2.139/1

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