Cyborg Saints: Religion and Posthumanism in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction / Edition 1

by Carissa Smith

Overview

Saints are currently undergoing a resurrection in middle grade and young adult fiction, as recent prominent novels by Socorro Acioli, Julie Berry, Adam Gidwitz, Rachel Hartman, Merrie Haskell, Gene Luen Yang, and others demonstrate. Cyborg Saints: Religion and Posthumanism in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction makes the radical claim that these holy medieval figures are actually the new cyborgs in that they dethrone the autonomous subject of humanist modernity. While young people navigate political and personal forces, as well as technologies, that threaten to fragment and thingify them, saints show that agency is still possible outside of the humanist construct of subjectivity. The saints of these neomedievalist novels, through living a life vulnerable to the other, attain a distributed agency that accomplishes miracles through bodies and places and things (relics, icons, pilgrimage sites, and ultimately the hagiographic text and its reader) spread across time. Cyborg Saints analyzes MG and YA fiction through the triple lens of posthumanism, neomedievalism, and postsecularism. Cyborg Saints charts new ground in joining religion and posthumanism to represent the creativity and diversity of young people’s fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367193164
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/10/2019
Series:	Children's Literature and Culture
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Carissa Turner Smith is Professor of English at Charleston Southern University.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Neomedievalist Saints and the Embodiment of Hagiographic History

Chapter Two: Cyborg Saints, Born and Made

Chapter Three: "Are We Not All Things?": Relics, Posthumanist Agency, and Intersubjectivity

Chapter Four: The Virgin Martyr of Comics: Distributed Agency and Saintly Iconography

Chapter Five: Posthumanist Pilgrimage: Trans-corporeal Journeys

Chapter Six: "Holy Dog!": Animal Studies, Tolerance Discourse, and Posthumanist Ethics

Conclusion

References

Index