Young adult literature is changing the way we think about trauma
In the late 1980s, psychologists first started to understand how people experience and process trauma. From the early 1990s onwards, writers of fiction started to explore these ideas in their work. These ideas have continued to evolve in literature and in psychology, further helping us understand how trauma impacts us, and how we can heal and move on.
PhD in English Literature graduate Talia Crockett has been researching how young adult literature tackles trauma.
“Young adult literature started to tackle trauma in the 1990s, and it’s still a popular topic today—so popular that there have even been calls for people to write less about trauma,” Talia says. “Just like with literature in general, the way in which authors write about trauma has changed significantly over that time.”
Young adult authors in the 1990s used certain techniques to represent trauma in their works. These literary devices aimed to represent the way traumatised people experience trauma.
“Trauma in writing had a certain aesthetic,” Talia says. “Fragmented narratives, stream of consciousness narration, and revelations of repressed memories were common devices. The psychological theory of trauma had only just become mainstream, and so this was a new and fresh area for authors to write about—but one that no one knew a lot about.”
As more people used these devices, they became seen as overused tropes. These days, Talia says, people are actively writing against these tropes.
“A great example of this is the YA novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. When you first hear the grandfather’s stories of the war, you think he is using the trope of using fairy tales as a metaphor to talk about a real-world war. The story then plays with this trope by revealing that the monsters are real, and his stories are literal.”
Literary experimentation is one of the reasons why representation of trauma is changing. One of the other reasons is, of course, that we know more about the psychology of trauma than we did in the 1990s. Interestingly, however, this relationship seems to be a two-way street—while psychological discoveries feed into literary ideas, literary and artistic works also feed into ideas about trauma.
“A pretty famous example of this is the idea of the flashback,” Talia says. “We saw trauma theorists writing about how people who were traumatised experienced flashbacks to certain events, and in that writing many of them referenced films that used flashbacks as a technique. If you look back, however, this theoretical writing came out after the films that feature flashbacks, so we don’t know for sure if the films were drawing from psychology, or if psychology in this case learned from the films.”
Another significant example of this comes from literature that explores post-colonial trauma.
“Trauma theory has often been focused on individual trauma and event-based trauma, with a Western approach,” Talia says. “That isn’t how post-colonial trauma works—it is ongoing and accumulative and can be passed down through generations. Through writing about their experiences with post-colonial trauma, Indigenous writers have changed the way trauma is widely understood. The definition of trauma now includes community trauma and non-event-based trauma.”
Writers are questioning both how we understand and talk about trauma, and how we write about it.
“I think there is real value in writing that asks questions and challenges what came before,” Talia says. “I think the young adult literature that is doing this with trauma is helping people confront their assumptions about how trauma has been represented in the past. This is helping shed new light on history and society, but it is also helping more people understand their own personal trauma.”
Talia looks forward to seeing more people take on trauma in young adult literature and continue to grow our understanding of trauma. She also hopes to keep researching in this space and encourages others to do so.
“I think young adult literature is often not taken seriously, and there isn’t much critical attention paid to the genre,” she says. “Young adult literature plays a crucial role in how young readers understand the world around them, and the way it represents trauma is only part of that, so I really hope that literary critics will continue to explore this fascinating field.”
Explore your creative passions through postgraduate study in English Literature.