Young adult literature featuring LGBTQ+ characters is booming. In the 1980s and 1990s, only a handful of such titles were published every year. Recently, these numbers have soared to over one hundred annual releases. Queer characters are also appearing more frequently in film, on television, and in video games. This explosion of queer representation, however, has prompted new forms of longstanding cultural anxieties about adolescent sexuality. What makes for a good “coming out” story? Will increased queer representation in young people’s media teach adolescents the right lessons and help queer teens live better, happier lives? What if these stories harm young people instead of helping them? In Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, Derritt Mason considers these questions through a range of popular media, including an assortment of young adult books; Caper in the Castro, the first-ever queer video game; online fan communities; and popular television series Glee and Big Mouth. Mason argues themes that generate the most anxiety about adolescent culture—queer visibility, risk taking, HIV/AIDS, dystopia and horror, and the promise that “It Gets Better” and the threat that it might not—challenge us to rethink how we read and engage with young people’s media. Instead of imagining queer young adult literature as a subgenre defined by its visibly queer characters, Mason proposes that we see “queer YA” as a body of transmedia texts with blurry boundaries, one that coheres around affect—specifically, anxiety—instead of content.

Offering a wide range of critical perspectives, this volume explores the moral, ideological and literary landscapes in fiction and other cultural productions aimed at young adults. Topics examined are adolescence and the natural world, nationhood and identity, the mapping of sexual awakening onto postcolonial awareness, hybridity and trans-racial romance, transgressive sexuality, the sexually abused adolescent body, music as a code for identity formation, representations of adolescent emotion, and what neuroscience research tells us about young adult readers, writers, and young artists. Throughout, the volume explores the ways writers configure their adolescent protagonists as awkward, alienated, rebellious and unhappy, so that the figure of the young adult becomes a symbol of wider political and societal concerns. Examining in depth significant contemporary novels, including those by Julia Alvarez, Stephenie Meyer, Tamora Pierce, Malorie Blackman and Meg Rosoff, among others, Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture illuminates the ways in which the cultural constructions 'adolescent' and 'young adult fiction' share some of society's most painful anxieties and contradictions.

This collection of essays explores a wealth of topics in children’s and young adult literature and culture. Contributions about picture-books include analyses of variants of the folktale “The Little Red Hen” and bullying. Race and gender are explored in essays about picture-books featuring children as consumable objects, about books focused on African American female athletes, and about young adult dystopian fiction. Gender itself is further explored in articles about Monster High, Joyce Carol Oates’s Beasts, and The Hunger Games and Divergent. Essays about fantasy literature include an exploration of environmentalism in Rick Riordan’s The Heroes of Olympus, a discussion of Severus Snape as a Judas figure, an explication of Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, and an analysis of ghosts and nationalism in Eva Ibbotson’s The Haunting of Granite Falls. An essay about Horrible Histories explores television, genre, and the way history is coded. Other contributions explore how teaching literature to reluctant readers can be effective through multimodal texts and how Harry Potter has played a role in the popularity of young adult literature for adult readers.

In this book, Rodríguez uses theories of critical literacy and culturally responsive teaching to argue that our schools, and our culture, need sustaining and inclusive young adult (YA) literature/s to meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse readers and all students. This book provides an outline for the study of literature through cultural and literary criticism, via essays that analyze selected YA literature (drama, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) in four areas: scribal identities and the self-affirmation of adolescents; gender and sexualities; schooling and education of young adult characters; and teachers’ roles and influences in characters’ coming of age. Applying critical literacy theories and a youth studies lens, this book shines a light on the need for culturally sustaining and inclusive pedagogies to read adolescent worlds. Complementing these essays are critical conversations with seven key contemporary YA literature writers, adding biographical perspectives to further expand the critical scholarship and merits of YA literature.

This book studies children’s and young adult literature of genocide since 1945, considering issues of representation and using postcolonial theory to provide both literary analysis and implications for educating the young. Many of the authors visited accurately and authentically portray the genocide about which they write; others perpetuate stereotypes or otherwise distort, demean, or oversimplify. In this focus on young people’s literature of specific genocides, Gangi profiles and critiques works on the Cambodian genocide (1975-1979); the Iraqi Kurds (1988); the Maya of Guatemala (1981-1983); Bosnia, Kosovo, and Srebrenica (1990s); Rwanda (1994); and Darfur (2003-present). In addition to critical analysis, each chapter also provides historical background based on the work of prominent genocide scholars. To conduct research for the book, Gangi traveled to Bosnia, engaged in conversation with young people from Rwanda, and spoke with scholars who had traveled to or lived in Guatemala and Cambodia. This book analyses the ways contemporary children, typically ages ten and up, are engaged in the study of genocide, and addresses the ways in which child survivors who have witnessed genocide are helped by literature that mirrors their experiences.

This collection of essays explores a wealth of topics in childrens and young adult (YA) literature and culture. The contributions include an examination of the Watchbird cartoons by Munro Leaf and their attempts to teach morals and manners; an ethnographic study about the role of public youth librarians; and an exploration of the role popular video games can play in the secondary classroom. Other topics investigated here encompass the presentation of environmentalism in Hayao Miyazakis films, psychological analyses, and the role of race, gender, and culture in childrens and YA literature.

Winner of the Children’s Literature Association’s 2023 Book Award During the early colonial encounter, children’s books were among the first kinds of literature produced by US writers introducing the new colony, its people, and the US’s role as a twentieth-century colonial power to the public. Subsequently, youth literature and media were important tools of Puerto Rican cultural and educational elite institutions and Puerto Rican revolutionary thought as a means of negotiating US assimilation and upholding a strong Latin American, Caribbean national stance. In Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture, author Marilisa Jiménez García focuses on the contributions of the Puerto Rican community to American youth, approaching Latinx literature as a transnational space that provides a critical lens for examining the lingering consequences of US and Spanish colonialism for US communities of color. Through analysis of texts typically outside traditional Latinx or literary studies such as young adult literature, textbooks, television programming, comics, music, curriculum, and youth movements, Side by Side represents the only comprehensive study of the contributions of Puerto Ricans to American youth literature and culture, as well as the only comprehensive study into the role of youth literature and culture in Puerto Rican literature and thought. Considering recent debates over diversity in children’s and young adult literature and media and the strained relationship between Puerto Rico and the US, Jiménez García's timely work encourages us to question who constitutes the expert and to resist the homogenization of Latinxs, as well as other marginalized communities, that has led to the erasure of writers, scholars, and artists.