In the Ellison Tradition: In/Visible Bodies of Adolescent and YA Fiction

When Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was published in 1952, he could not have known the impact his metaphor of invisibility would have on adolescent and YA literature. However, upon closer inspection, the importance and prevalence of his metaphor becomes evident. Authors of adolescent and YA literature routinely use the metaphor as an intertextual shortcut to discuss issues that shape adolescent subjectivity, which is demonstrated through an examination of Sapphire’s Push, Virginia Hamilton’s The Planet of Junior Brown, and Robert Cormier’s Fade