Department of English

This thesis reconsiders the classic Bildungsroman coming-of-age narrative by looking at contemporary Young Adult speculative novels Legendborn by Tracy Deonn and Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim. Unlike the White male protagonist which the classic Bildungsroman centers around, these novels feature young women of color who, discover within a speculative genre, that they have magical capabilities. This thesis traces various directions of growth that complicate the idea of “growing up” by looking for moments that expose the characters as looking backwards within their memories, moving through time and space in unanticipated ways aided by magic, accessing a multitude of “selves” within, and making negotiations between their interior and exterior world. This paper will suggest that instead of following a linear coming-of-age trajectory, growth emerges in the texts as entangled, spontaneous, unpredictable, and inscrutable. In this case, the Bildungsroman provides a narrative structure to talk back to, or look around. I argue that these movements are made by a fragmented collection of “selves” that the protagonists embody, granting them an elusive quality, making their identities hard to categorize. The Bildungsroman classically follows a White heterosexual male character as they leave the shelter of home and integrate into society. My thesis intentionally shifts away from this model by reconsidering this narrative when it is applied to marginalized subjects and intervened by the presence of magic. In the end, my thesis argues that these protagonists evade static endings when we reconfigure the Bildungsroman as spontaneous, relational, and never ending, granting the characters potential and agency rather than assigning them a specific role in society. Here, I evade linearity in my own writing by discussing opinions within the footnotes and bringing poetry into each section to willfully undermine a voice of scholarly authority. Inspired by feminist writers who infuse their work with vulnerability and embodied approaches to the text, I delve into lived-experiences to express the fact that like these protagonists, my own personhood has stakes in how we reconfigure the Bildungsroman.