He/him
Associate Professor of Teaching, Department of English Language and Literatures
Office: Buchanan Tower, Room 426
Email: rick.gooding@ubc.ca
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I grew up in Edmonton and studied at the University of Alberta and the Université de Dijon before going to Dalhousie for my PhD. My doctoral dissertation was on the construction of subjectivity in the novels of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, and I spent some time after graduation working on the connections between literature and medicine in the eighteenth century. About fifteen years ago, mainly as the result of a lucky teaching assignment, I became interested in children’s and YA literature, and my professional life has centred on the field ever since. Most of my research and teaching is on children’s literature after 1960, but I still sometimes teach a course on children’s, YA, and crossover literature in thee period 1660-1800.
Teaching interests and Recent Courses
Posthumanism in YA literature, Representations of the Anthropocene in Writing for Youth, Surveillance in Young Adult Literature, 17th- and 18th-century children’s and YA literature, Theoretical approaches to fairy tales.
MACL-related Courses
ENGL 353: Making Middle-Class Girls: Gender, Class, Education, and Unspoken Anxieties in Eighteenth-Century Writing for Youth
ENGL 392: Posthuman Bodies, Cybernetic Selves: Responses to Technology in Writing for Young Adults
Research Interests
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century children’s literature, fairy tales, adaptation, posthumanism
Selected Publications
“‘We do not have whims on the moon’: A Wrinkle in Time, The Lotus Caves, and the Problem of American Exceptionalism in 1960s Science Fiction for Children.” Forthcoming in The Lion and the Unicorn, 2021.
With Ada Bieber, “Streams of Consciousness: The Downriver Narrative in Young Adult Fiction.” International Research in Children’s Literature 13.1 (2020): 61-75.
“Our Posthuman Adolescence: Dystopia, Information Technologies, and the Construction of Subjectivity in M.T. Anderson’s Feed.” Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature. Eds. Brett Grubisic, Tara Lee, and Gisèle Baxter. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014. 111-127.
“Clockwork: Philip Pullman’s Posthuman Fairy Tale.” Children’s Literature in Education 42 (2011): 308 – 324. Winner of Children’s Literature Association Article Award for 2011.
“‘Something Very Old and Very Slow’: Coraline, Uncanniness, and Narrative Form.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 33 (Winter 2008): 390 – 407.
Current Projects
Constructions of posthuman subjectivity in recent YA fiction