America's Next Literary Foil: Deconstructing the Orientalized Body of the Other in Miranda Kenneally's Coming Up for Air.

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine Orientalism as a literary characterization mechanism in the contemporary American young adult sports novel Coming Up for Air (2017), written by Miranda Kenneally. The story explores the transition year of Maggie King to a swimming sports university in the United States. The analysis in this article, however, will focus on Roxy Coulter, Maggie’s antagonist in the plot and rival at the pool. Owing to her exoticized and eroticized depiction, Roxy becomes a fictional figure whose analysis serves to trace the persistence of the oriental motif in the current teen book market. In juvenile literature, otherization can contribute to fostering identification with the protagonist. In this sense, I seek to demonstrate that the parallel established between its antagonist, Roxy, as a foil character who is orientalized reveals a larger nationalist, ethnocentric and gendered identification superstructure of Americanness.