Those wild things: adolescents as monsters and savages in David Almond’s oeuvre

This chapter explores the representations of adolescence in British author David Almond’s oeuvre. Using the lens of the evidence-based paradigm (Ginzburg 1989; Faeti 2001) integrated with contemporary theories of metaphors – in particular, Umberto Eco’s interpretative semiotics (2005) and Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive linguistics (1980) –, the contribution focuses on seven youth novels by Almond, beginning with Skellig (1998) and concluding with The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean Telt by Hisself (2011). In these works, the author creates enlightening metaphors for adolescence – namely wilderness, monstrosity, a vertical space-time dimension, and the use of an experimental language and form – that can be read as representations of adolescents’ otherness and contribute to depict adolescence as a time of opportunities, a period of enormous potential in which the extraordinary inside and outside oneself is revealed. A careful examination of each referenced novel shows indeed how Almond’s metaphors – having a cognitive power, and not a merely decorative and ornamental function – help create a new reality around the concept of adolescence, thereby deconstructing the pathologizing narrations which have now become part of the collective imagery.