A Girl's Best Friend? Implications of Friendship on Female Self-identity in Young Adult Literature
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Understanding one’s self-identity is a key part of adolescence, especially for girls. But what external factors determine one’s self-perception? By examining the works of five mass-market young adult authors, Ann Brashares, Meg Cabot, E. Lockhart, Cynthia Voigt, and Cecily von Ziegesar, evidence suggests that friends and peers influence a girl’s self-understanding and subjectivity through ritual, shared environment, language, objectification and acceptance or denial of change in the relationship. This paper also looks at key theories of literature, including panopticism, subjectivity and the problem novel in their relation to mass-market literature for girls.