ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author have chosen three recent young adult novels to illustrate his argument. In The White Darkness, 14-year-old Sym, who is hearing-impaired, is abducted to Antarctica by her uncle, driven by obsession with the theory of a hollow earth. Sixteen-year old Laureth in She is Not Invisible, manages, despite her blindness, to fly from London to New York in search of her missing father. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, features 15-year-old Christopher who overcomes his social and emotional incompetence to search for his missing mother. It focuses on two mutually dependent questions: firstly, how disability is represented; and, secondly, how the texts are constructed narratively to optimise readers' cognitive and affective engagement. Cognitive literary criticism claims that we read fiction because we are curious about other people's experiences and because we believe, probably on the subconscious level, that knowledge of fictional people can be useful for us in understanding people in real life.
