Complicating the Country: Rural Identities and Environmental Values in Youth Fiction

This paper complicates narratives of rurality and environmentalism in young adult fiction. Employing positioning theory and methods of critical content analysis, findings describe how rural youth respond to their social environments and environmental issues and what this might mean for young readers. The paper asserts that a focus on environmentalism in youth fiction can trouble dominant narratives of rural communities as either nostalgic and romanticised country places or hostile sites of economic and social disparities by revealing the complexity of rural life when grounded in hope and collective action around conservation and environmental protection.