An Introduction

Today in my Women's Lit class we were assigned to create our blogs for the semester. I don't know if we are supposed to post anything yet but I thought an introduction (for my teacher, my classmates, and anyone else who may be reading this) would be a nice way to start the blog. The theme of this blog, as you can probably tell from the title, is women in dystopian novels. Specifically, for now, I am going to focus on novels that meet the following requirements:

-Young Adult, so the protagonist will most likely be a young adult herself and the target audience will be young adults.

-Contemporary, written in the last ten years or so.

-Female, the protagonist must be female and in most cases the book should be written by a female. There may be exceptions to both of these requirements as long as one of them is met.

-Dystopian, this one's a given, but I would also like to talk about what the definition of dystopian is and where is the line drawn between dystopian and other similar genres?

The last two requirements on this list are there for obvious reasons, but you may be wondering why I want to focus on contemporary young adult novels. I would be open to exploring older dystopian novels and also novels written for both older and younger crowds in the future, but there is a reason I would like to focus on this for now.

Ever since The Hunger Games became popular, YA dystopian novels have become one of the most popular genres in YA fiction. Five years ago when I went to a bookstore I saw an entire shelf dedicated to vampire books, due to the popularity of Twilight at the time. I personally was never a huge fan of "paranormal romance" novels, but I could kind of see the appeal. Dark, mysterious, handsome men (of the un-human variety) sweeping a young girl off of her feet and introducing her to a whole new world. Girls thought of it as passionate, exciting, dark, and romantic. And while there are plenty of romantic elements in dystopian novels, the female protagonists seem to be far more independent and feministic. I want to explore why that is what most teenage girls are reading today and if it is a positive or negative thing.

Looking forward to the future of this blog, hope you enjoy!