Strange Land

Abstract

My dissertation, Strange Land, is about the transition from youth to adulthood as it follows a young woman that travels to India to seek change. There she finds challenges and comforts that she did not expect, as well as a new sense of normality that she didn't know she craved. My work is concerned with how a young woman copes with being simultaneously pushed into adulthood and held back in childhood. The crossover fiction between young adult and adult literature influenced me heavily in the writing of this novel. In particular, Kristin Cashore's novel, Graceling, explores the ideas of identity construction and loss that are relevant in most crossover fiction and that I used heavily in my own work. Her work engages with the instability of relationships as a source of internal conflict and the problem of finding oneself after getting purposefully lost.