"The multidisciplinary critical discourse of ecofeminism has its roots in the connection between oppressive and exploitative attitudes towards, and treatment of, women under western patriarchy and oppressive and exploitative attitudes towards, and treatment of, nature under patriarchal capitalist economy. In this thesis I extend this connection to encompass children and young adults alongside women and nature, in a tripartite analysis informed by the critical history, philosophy and ethics of ecofeminism. In bringing ecofeminist theory to bear on a study of contemporary literature for young adults I address this connection by positing women, nature and children (or 'the child') as comparable sites of semantic ambiguity; all three are natural, biological organisms yet all three are also subject to intense symbolic social constructivism. Both women and children have traditionally been associated with the natural world, whilst women, children and nature are, and have been, envisaged and treated as oppressed or subordinate groups within patriarchal social systems. Thus an ecofeminist reading of fiction for young adults can offer to children's literature an analysis of comparable oppressive conceptual frameworks afflicting women, nature and children, specifically by engaging with the construction of young adult subjectivity within the context of the (threatened) natural environment. My analysis centres on post-disaster novels for young adults that imagine the consequences of environmental crisis. These novels illuminate a 'masculine' model of understanding in current discourses of climate change, with science and technology functioning as abstract concepts in the struggle to avert planetary disaster. I situate my analysis of these novels within a theoretical ecofeminist framework in order to provide an alternative ethical model with which to counter such discourses of crisis and disembodiment. Within this alternative framework I move from an analysis of the western secularisation of, and alienation from, nature to counter-hegemonic attempts - promoted by ecofeminists - to reclaim an embodied and embedded human connection with the earth through the 'feminine' values - such as emotion, care and kinship - traditionally underplayed within normative ethical frameworks. An ecofeminist reading of young adult fiction can inform not only an examination of current modes of environmental representation but also an analysis of young adult subject positioning at a time of necessary ecological appraisal." -- abstract.