'Hoe het voelt om een meisje te zijn'. Representaties van adolescentie in de roman Regeneratie van Eva Coolen.

In Eva Coolen's novel Regeneratie (2021), adolescence as a stage of life plays an important role. The reader follows two teenage girls, who are on the run from a situation that spiraled out of control as well as from the environment they grew up in. Representations of adolescence/ts in novels influence readers' ideas about adolescence/ts. The 'Youth Lens', coined by Petrone et al. (2014), offers a critical form of textual analysis that examines how adolescence is represented and what role texts play in reinforcing and/ or subverting dominant ideas about adolescence. So far, this approach received limited attention in Dutch literary research, in spite of the fact that the rise of young adult literature underscores the significance of a critical examination of representations of adolescence in (youth) literary texts. In this article, I describe the key precepts of the Youth Lens and use this approach to analyze representations of adolescence in Regeneratie. Furthermore, I will open a space for the use of this approach in Dutch secondary literature teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]