South African teenagers reading about themselves in fiction : their response within the cultural practice of reading in South Africa

Bibliography: leaves 126-134.The Young Africa Awards Series (YAA) was commissioned as a competition challenging South African writers to produce novels for teenagers that were relevant to their lived reality in South African society today. All the novels examined in this dissertation can be defined as realism. In this study the text is examined as a written locus of meanings around which are constellated oral and written discourses that frame the text. I discuss the ideology operating through the competition's publishers and judges. I also examine the meaning produced through the YAA competition through an analysis of reader responses to different YAA novels