ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 explores young adult (YA) dystopian fiction, focusing on works by Lois Lowry and Octavia Butler that respond to coming-of-age character formulae. Recent YA scholarship draws attention to the tension between YA dystopias’ feminist utopian/critical dystopian aspects and their contradictory traditionalism. This chapter shows how these tensions are worked out through a staging of the relation between character and family. Both Lowry’s male teen protagonist in The Giver and Butler’s female teen protagonist in the Parable novels engage in a type of the family romance, discovering themselves as world-heroic figures destined to right the wrongs of previous generations.
