Narrative Negotiation and Grieving Girlhood: A Constructivist Grounded Theory of Maternal Loss in Young Adult Novels

This dissertation develops a grounded theory, Female Adolescent Parental Grief as a Site of Narrative Negotiation (FAPGSN), to examine how contemporary young adult (YA) fiction represents the grief experiences of adolescent girls following parental loss. While dominant bereavement models often conceptualize grief as individual, linear, or pathological, this study reconceptualizes adolescent grief as a gendered, relational, and culturally scripted process shaped by intersecting expectations around femininity, maturity, emotional regulation, and institutional control.

Using a hybrid methodology that combines Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) with Critical Content Analysis (CCA), and drawing on Youth Lens (YL), Feminist Grief Theory (FGT), Girlhood Studies (GS), and Postmemory Theory (PT), the study analyzes three YA novels: The Astonishing Color of After (Pan, 2019), How to Make Friends with the Dark (Glasgow, 2019), and The Weight of Everything (Mickelson, 2023). Through iterative coding and close textual analysis, the study identifies dominant cultural grief scripts such as The Dutiful Daughter, The Stoic Success Story, and The Disciplined Girl, which regulate how girls are expected to perform grief through silence, self-sacrifice, and emotional containment.

The analysis further reveals how protagonists reflect, resist, negotiate, and reshape these scripts, generating counter-scripts that reclaim grief as nonlinear, creative, and identity-forming. CCA reveals how literary elements such as metaphor, narrative structure, silence, setting, and symbolic gesture disrupt adultist norms and create new forms of emotional meaning. The theoretical model FAPGSN is organized around three core categories: Emotional Resistance, Relational Rebellion, and Narrative Defiance. These categories demonstrate how grief becomes a site of feminist refusal, relational redefinition, and narrative authorship.

This study contributes a new framework for understanding adolescent grief as an act of cultural critique and narrative agency. It also highlights the pedagogical potential of YA literature as a trauma-informed, culturally responsive resource for supporting adolescent readers in navigating grief and emotional complexity. While the analysis focuses on a limited set of Western YA texts, the FAPGSN model offers a foundation for future studies examining how female adolescent grief is represented across diverse identities, media forms, and educational contexts.