Shawn Lisa Maurer’s presentation on “Technologies of Grieving in the Eighteenth-Century School Story” explores school story narratives by three women writers of the period – Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Lamb – to show how the sharing of life stories provides opportunities to experience, understand, regulate, and potentially transform loss through what Maurer calls a “technology of grieving”—an emotional and cognitive process that transpires in relation to others and across time. While Fielding advocates for self-regulation, and Wollstonecraft advises benevolent uses of grief, Lamb leans in to ongoing experiences of loss. By focusing on the complex unfolding of the grieving process in each educational fiction, Maurer shows how such educations in loss can provide both characters and readers with powerful forms of understanding as well as agency.
Julie Veitch frames her analysis of the popular and best-selling Series of Unfortunate Events through scholar Karen Coats’ observation that “Gothic literature may help children cope by bringing trauma and violence out in the open where it may be seen as absurd and laughed at” (qtd. in Mirtz 128). For Veitch, Snicket uses the framework of a Gothic mystery to help young readers face harsh realities about death and grief: although the orphans are working through the loss of their parents and home throughout the series, the main focus of the narrative resides in the overarching Gothic mystery of the Baudelaire parents’ deaths and their involvement with a mysterious organization. The Baudelaires’ attempts to piece together what their parents were wrapped up in before their deaths become an allegory for trying to process grief and find some sense of closure after the death of a loved one. The series’ ending offers a stark reality which refuses answers. Instead, they simply come to a point where they need to let go, move on, and focus on what family they have left.
Gina E. Mingoia’s presentation, “'After all this time': Prolonged Grief and the Harry Potter Series,” argues for Rowling's Harry Potter series as an inversion of Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. Even as our cultural frameworks for grief return to Freud, in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, by contrast, Harry’s mourning does not end: he holds on to his grief throughout the entirety of the seven-book series. In fact, this holding on to grief—Harry’s melancholia or his prolonged grief disorder—is depicted as an asset.
If, as scholar Lydia Kokkola argues, contemporary young adult (YA) literature often teaches teenagers that sexual desire or action will irrevocably lead to pain and loss and rife with grief, Tita Kyrtsakas shows how some contemporary YA novels introduce another framework. In place of loss of innocence demanding loss of hope and loss of agency, some contemporary YA literature challenges the traditional pairing of trauma with sex through the author’s inclusion of pleasure and joy. In Kyrtsakas’s reading, two Michael L. Printz award winning fictional books – Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give you the Sun (2014) and Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X (2019) -- alongside non-fiction texts such as Nikol Hasler’s Sex: An Uncensored Introduction (2015) offer a new paradigm.