The Same Place That Breaks You, Heals You: Landscape Transformation in Contemporary American Young Adult Fiction

This paper discusses how physical landscapes are transformed
emotionally in four contemporary American Young Adult novels that
represent the different literary generations - Looking for Alaska (John
Green, 2005), All the Bright Places (Jennifer Niven, 2015), The Serpent
King (Jeff Zentner, 2016), and I Am Still Alive (Kate Alice Marshall,
2018). Based on Sara Ahmed’s Affect Theory and Suzanne Keen’s
Empathy Theory, the research points out that physical landscapes in
these novels are not mere passive settings but rather active emotional
forces that change from places of happiness and belonging into places of
sorrow and trauma, and finally into places of healing and transformation.
Using the methods of close reading and comparative textual analysis,
this article explored how the very same landscape which accommodates
a protagonist's suffering also turns into the place of their healing - thus
proving that location and emotion are closely linked in Young Adult
fiction. Also, the research indicates that landscape change operates as the
main storytelling technique through which writers evoke empathy in
their readers. By presenting the emotional topographies of four different
locations - institutional wandering rural, and wilderness