Niching New Materialist Studies: Contemporary North American Young Adult Sports Fiction as Anorexia Bibliotherapy

Abstract

The aim of this MA thesis is to evaluate from a sociological literary viewpoint the contemporary Young Adult Sports Fiction novel by North American author Miranda Kenneally Breathe, Annie, Breathe (2014). The novel’s representation of its athletically performing young woman protagonist is considered a cognitive and affective role model with potential for promoting functionally oriented corporeal understandings, concerning what the organism can sensibly do and be put to do. Readers with eating disorders and vulnerabilities to them, I propose, can reshape meanings and goals of projects in their life away from abjection as they read of the bodily in this light. In short, the suggestion extends to the claim that literary fiction produces role models which alter the very states of readers. Such states, given their mental status, can be explored from a neurological and cognitive perspective. In particular, Annie’s quest is taken as the beginning of a psychosomatic notion of well-being many North-American girls can feel engaged in. With fiction and corporeality thus examined, I suggest that this approach to literary studies opens a unique and novel spot in bibliotherapeutic and New Materalist studies, with crucial implications for the politics of the bodily.