Of Risk and Youth: Exploring Discourses of Adolescence Through Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now

Abstract

New developments in the field of youth studies are calling for a reorientation of discourses of adolescence away from developmental tropes of transition, crisis, and dysfunction, and towards a more fluid sociocultural framework. Meg Rosoff’s acclaimed novel How I Live Now (2004) achieves a balance that transcends the pitfalls of developmentalism and gestures towards a sociological model of adolescence. In this novel, key developmental ideas such as risk, vulnerability and liminality are not the province of the young characters, but are reframed as the defining features of the dystopic society they inhabit. Rosoff’s critical revision of dominant ideas about adolescence is facilitated by her fluid use of different literary traditions ranging from adolescent realism and evacuation fiction to dystopia.