Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction

Introduction

Boom! Goes the Hypercanon: On the Importance of the Overlooked and Understudied in Young Adult Literature

Rebekah Fitzsimmons and Casey Alane Wilson

In the last two decades, Young Adult (YA) literature has become increasingly popular; both the YA fan base and YA publishing imprints have continued to grow at a time when many other subsets of book publishing are shrinking (Corbitt). Consequently, fans, critics, television and film producers, and academics all have turned more attention to the YA field. While YA continues to expand, however, the corpus of texts that are most taught, studied, and critically examined regularly overlap with texts discussed in the popular media; this has created an increasingly small hypercanon of texts that are very often limited to the kinds of bestseller texts that make a huge impact on popular culture (Fitzsimmons 203). To non-experts, the category of young adult literature is often considered to be synonymous with huge blockbuster fiction titles like Harry Potter, Twilight, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hunger Games. As a result, many experts in YA feel the need to frame their work in terms of this small collection of texts to justify their work’s value: writers foreground these blockbuster texts in their essays, presenters discuss them at conferences, and teachers design entire courses around them. While the popularity of these notable books helps writers to connect with audiences and attract students and researchers to the field of children’s literature, limiting scholarship to this hypercanon means many valuable and important perspectives and approaches are left out.

This collection intends to address this challenge by interrogating the depth and breadth of YA literature by bringing together essays that perform a large-scale meta-analysis of current trends and subgenres within YA. As a consequence of this aim, the collection has two major goals. The first is to provide scholars, critics, and readers of YA literature a model to move away from analysis focused only on singular popular texts and toward a broader framework of common themes, character arcs, and genre conventions present in the contemporary YA field. While close readings are a valuable analytical tool—and, indeed, are present in various forms throughout this collection—our intention is not to offer deep analyses of individual texts. Instead, we offer a bird’s-eye view of the field that explores the ways genres, themes, and trends are shaped across multiple texts. This macrolevel approach allows our contributors to examine crucial intertextual references, texts with overlapping plot structures, and the social and political contexts surrounding the emergence of new subgenres that often appears only in the background of micro-level analyses. By collecting essays on broader theoretical and generic frameworks, this collection offers an exciting glimpse of a field exploding with popularity while acknowledging and examining that field’s awkward limitations and categorical growing pains.

The second major goal of this collection is to expand the corpus of materials with which children’s literature scholarship regularly engages and examines. As the field of YA literature grapples with its own historical limitations in terms of representation and works to feature an increased diversity of voices, YA scholarship should likewise diversify the genres and titles of texts it examines.¹ As we address in this introduction, the focus of critical and pedagogical attention primarily on blockbuster books risks limiting our understanding of young adult literature—and thereby reinscribing incomplete visions of the work being done in the field. By providing metacritical frameworks as well as extended reading lists within each subgenre, this collection opens doors for scholars and teachers alike to engage with a broader range of texts by a more extensive list of authors. While our collection is not, and cannot be, exhaustive, it nonetheless offers interventions into an extensive range of pressing conversations, such as the inescapable prevalence of dystopian fiction in post-9/11 YA literature, the impact of gender normativity on the adolescent experience, and the reenvisioning of old genres to encompass more complex, diverse, and accurate representations of twenty-first-century teens. Rather than narrowing our focus to one particular point of contention in the field, we have brought together contributors who can speak across the field, offering a unique insight into the breadth of conversations the study of YA makes possible. Rooting our discussion in the historical and contextual realities of young adult literature as it currently exists, our collection will open new avenues of intervention, and scholarship that is better prepared to address the diverse realities of YA in the future.

Young Adult Literature

Young adult literature—much like the audience to which it caters—is both young and profoundly complex. A product of the twentieth century, the category of young adult literature emerged as a means for publishers to capitalize on the rise of the new teenage subculture that grew out of the World War II era.² Although initially written for an adult readership, Maureen Daly’s 1942 novel Seventeenth Summer is often credited as the first modern young adult novel; the quietly romantic tale, comparable in form and plot to many of today’s contemporary YA romances, prioritized the world of the teenage protagonist to the exclusion of the greater (adult) world (Pattee 10).³ This focus on the teenage experience quickly became a hallmark of the category and gained more weight with the 1967 arrival of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. Both Daly and Hinton were young writers, lending veracity to their attempts to center the young narrator’s perspective. Books aimed at young adult readers no longer needed the invasive, prescriptive voice of an adult on the page to be valid and successful—the teenager and her ideas sufficed. Although the authenticity of having young writers at the forefront soon faded in favor of adults writing in the voice of teenagers, texts like Go Ask Alice (1971), a book ghost-written by an adult but framed as a diary kept by an anonymous young girl, demonstrated that the priority of the youth perspective, however constructed, would remain.

The development of an appropriately teenage voice had further ramifications for the publishing category, most notably in the thematic and structural elements that quickly became hallmarks of young adult literature. Given the category’s focus on characters whose age positions them on the verge of adulthood, YA literature is often associated with the coming-of-age story. As Roberta Seelinger Trites explains, however, the notion that YA literature is exclusively about coming of age—that is, the bildungsroman—has been overgeneralized (10). While some YA novels do bring their protagonists to adulthood by the end of the story, many choose instead to have their characters take only a few more steps along the path toward coming of age. As such, Trites argues that it is important to recognize that YA literature is also active within the tradition of the entwicklungsroman—that is, novels of development (10). As we will see throughout this collection, the role of progress—toward knowledge, toward complexity, toward adulthood—remains central to many of the conversations in twenty-first-century YA literature. Recognizing that the teenage protagonist must experience some form of growth, regardless of whether or not that growth brings them into adulthood, is a hallmark of most young adult novels currently on the shelves.⁴

One of the primary ways the teenage character experiences this development within YA literature is by disrupting the systems that define their lives. Editor Mark Aronson suggests that YA literature by necessity reflects the space we have carved out for the real-world teenage experience, explaining that teenagers are encouraged to test themselves against society, each other, and themselves in some mix that includes sex, thought, conformity, and rebellion (33). Being a young adult in the way Aronson describes is a performative act in which members must test themselves in one of the prescribed ways in order to fully claim an identity. Sociologists like Kent Baxter point to the constructedness of adolescence itself, a phase of life invented in response to historical and cultural moments; the very concept of storm and stress as a defining feature of a young person’s life was invented by G. Stanley Hall in his seminal text Adolescence, which used biological and psychological milestones to frame what would become the stereotypical, troubling traits society feared in its teenagers. While this is admittedly a perspective that presumes value in defining adolescents in relation to what Nancy Lesko calls narratives of growing up and biologically based developmental schemas, it is the perspective that most accurately reflects the discourse that surrounds teenagers today (138). Child-saving movements and institutions, including high schools, scouting organizations like the Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls, the juvenile justice system, and even young adult literature were formed in order to prevent teens from living up to society’s worst expectations; without intervention, these child-savers feared, teens would naturally become uneducated, hormone-fueled, peer-pressured, sex-crazed juvenile delinquents.

Despite the overtly constructed nature of the form, many scholars argue that the literature written for young adults must embrace the liminality of the space teenagers occupy in order to be productive. As Perry Nodelman explains, young adult fiction might both be similar to other texts written for children and vary from them. Perhaps young adults’ texts are those that begin with the standard polarities [of child and adult] of children’s fiction but have the potential, at least, to deconstruct them (58). Thus, Nodelman suggests that while children’s texts are deeply rooted in the perceived separation between child and adult, young adult texts can offer a way of complicating that relationship. Trites goes further, arguing that this is, in fact, the driving pedagogical impulse behind YA literature. She writes, The chief characteristic that distinguishes adolescent literature from children’s literature is the issue of how social power is deployed during the course of the narrative … protagonists must learn about the social forces that have made them what they are (2–3). As Trites notes, these social forces may take many shapes—including the layered and tangled interactions between concrete institutions like school, government, and church, and more abstract constructions like race, sexuality, and gender—but it is often the goal of YA literature to disassemble them in order to put their inner workings on display for teenage readers. Trites later points out, however, that the examination of and rebellion against these social forces often ends in a sanctioned form: Adolescents have to fail at one form of institutionally proscribed rebellion before they find an institutionally tolerated form of rebellion that paradoxically allows them to remain within the system (34). That is, the teenage protagonist is allowed to examine the inner workings of an oppressive system but is rarely given the tools to break free of the system entirely.

Blockbuster Books

While young adult literature has thus been built around the teenage audience and its evolving place within society, the category itself has undergone many transitions and transformations throughout its decades of existence. In part, this is because young adult literature is not a single genre but a publishing category that encompasses multiple genres, therefore allowing the market to more efficiently respond to the whims of reader demands. The popularity of The Outsiders spawned an entire decade of so-called problem novels; the immense reach of Sweet Valley High supported a boom in mass-market series fiction; the blockbuster arrival of Twilight sparked a surge in the popularity of paranormal romance. The very expansiveness of YA literature is the quality that allows it to be successful: with so many styles and writers under its giant tent, it can respond nimbly as its young readers jump from trend to trend and genre to genre.

Despite the complexity and depth of the YA category, however, much of contemporary culture still views YA literature as an overly simplistic genre filled with superfluous melodrama and silly, overused plot devices—not least because of the rise of more visible blockbuster books. While the term blockbuster is most commonly associated with films to mean a hugely successful popular film laden with car chases, expensive special effects, and big-name actors, the term has been increasingly applied to other forms of media such as record labels, television networks, and digital platforms like YouTube. Even book publishers have begun to rely on major hits—as opposed to a diversified list of steady sellers—as the primary source of profit.⁵ For the purposes of this collection, a blockbuster book is defined as a bestselling book that exceeds conventional or expected boundaries such as genre or marketing categories. Blockbusters are the books that become so recognizable they can be comfortably featured in multiple sections of a bookstore; for example, The DaVinci Code could be found in Popular Fiction, Mystery, Crime/Thriller, and Historical Fiction, while Twilight could comfortably sit cover out in the YA, Romance, Paranormal/Science Fiction, and Bestselling sections, and both texts could make seasonal appearances on the Beach Reads and Before it was a Motion Picture displays. As a result of their boundary-crossing nature, these books also regularly expand readership beyond traditional genre or category expectations in order to achieve a wider cultural recognition, which often leads to crossover into other forms of media (film, television, video games) that bring even more readers back to the original text.

The history and evolution of young adult literature has thus regularly been tied to the blockbuster book: a singular success in one genre makes room for an array of lesser-known entrants to follow. The current success of the YA market owes an immense debt to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2007), which ranked as USA Today’s best-selling book of 2008. The popularity of Twilight reinvigorated the YA publishing industry and launched a massive interest in the paranormal romance genre. This blockbuster was followed by the overwhelming success of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) and the successive flood of dystopian trilogies. Later, John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012) ignited a resurgence of the contemporary romance genre. Since blockbuster books dissolve the often arbitrary readership boundaries set up by publishing categories, such as those between teen and adult readers, these texts often draw attention to a subgenre and its regular readers in new and sometimes unexpected ways. In the case of YA, Rachel Falconer notes that the phenomenon of crossover fiction, or books like Twilight that find an adult audience despite being written for younger readers, made people acutely aware of the lack of consensus about what constituted appropriate reading for children as opposed to adults, and by extension, about the difficulty of maintaining traditional distinctions between childhood and adulthood (3). As a result of this new widespread recognition, experts and non-experts alike produce (and subsequently reproduce) discussions about those subgenres that focus almost exclusively on the blockbuster texts. As Fitzsimmons has argued in previous scholarship, the blockbuster status of these books often usurps the authority and cultural relevance of other cultural markers, such as industry prizes, reviews, or critical acclaim (155–65). The resulting hypercanon often defines the children’s and YA categories within the mainstream understanding, overshadowing other landmark texts and leading to misunderstanding or oversimplification of these categories.

In the case of YA, repeated conversations centered on texts like Twilight, The Hunger Games, and The Fault in Our Stars create a narrow view of YA literature both within the field of children’s literature studies and within the public imagination. Fueling this misperception are articles and opinion pieces published in popular media outlets that dismiss YA literature outright, especially those chiding adults for reading these juvenile texts. The non-expert authors of these articles often point to specific blockbuster texts as metonymic representations of what the genre of YA literature looks like, highlighting the immense popularity of these texts as one of their many flaws.⁶ Cultural critics are quick to reprimand (white male) adults for engaging with the vacuous frippery of stories that often feature the lives and concerns of young women, lecturing them for reading down by picking up an unserious genre of literature.

Theoretical Framework

It is this overall impression of homogeneity that this book seeks to correct by highlighting the vast array of genres, developmental patterns, and tropes that are regularly published under the umbrella of YA literature. To accomplish this goal, this collection provides scholars, critics, and readers of YA literature a critical model of metanarrative analysis, or analysis of multiple texts with similar themes, character types, tropes, or genre conventions. By focusing on distant reading techniques and constructing frameworks that illuminate conventions of these established and emerging subgenres, this collection adds to the growing body of critical work focused specifically on theorizing YA as its own category of literature. These essays provide clear evidence against the overarching reductive readings of YA as a uniform genre, while outlining avenues for future study of forthcoming texts.

Second, by pushing the conversation beyond the most commonly recognized blockbuster texts, the contributors to this collection present a wider, more diverse range of stories, storytellers, and approaches to the complex issues faced by teens. In exposing scholars, teachers, and readers of YA to a broader base of texts to work with, we aim to demonstrate that the texts under discussion within the hypercanon are not the only texts worthy of attention and analysis, nor are the texts chosen to be made into blockbuster films the only texts that can capture the attention of teen readers. In line with and in support of the goals of #WeNeedDiverseBooks and the #OwnVoices movements, this collection seeks to establish new theoretical frameworks for engaging with texts beyond those actively promoted by the current publishing industry. While these conversations have gained traction in recent years—including with the blockbuster status of texts like Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017)—we recognize that they have yet to be treated with anything approaching parity within the critical environment. Therefore, this collection aims to engage with intersectional theoretical approaches that acknowledge the financial and demographic realities of the YA publishing market while still pushing toward a more inclusive picture of YA literature that accurately reflects readers, authors, teachers, and scholars from diverse backgrounds.

Bearing these factors in mind, we have encouraged our contributors to select their texts based on a few specific guidelines. First, the majority of the texts discussed within this collection have been published after 2005, a year marked by a variety of changes to the media landscape: the launch of YouTube, the expansion of Facebook to high school students, and the release of landmark YA texts like Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies and John Green’s Looking for Alaska. Although there are immensely valuable texts from before this time that qualify as both understudied and overlooked, we have chosen to use this time frame to tie our discussions to the rise of the blockbuster-book trend in twenty-first-century YA literature, which emerged most notably with the 2007 release of Twilight. Moreover, we have chosen to focus specifically on YA literature as a publishing category. While middle-grade fiction and texts aimed at younger readers are worthy of similar metatextual analysis, lumping them in with discussions of the teenage readership would ultimately do all texts involved a disservice, as they often have different pedagogical intent, marketing strategies, and boundary-crossing potential. Similarly, although we recognize the ongoing evolution of New Adult literature—that is, books aimed at a slightly older readership, often about college-age characters—we have, with minimal exceptions, opted to treat New Adult as a separate publishing category as well. While we do recognize the importance of crossover texts—adult literature read by teens, YA literature read by adults, books that hover right on the thematic extremes of each category—we chose to prioritize those texts that have been specifically published and marketed as YA novels, in order to maintain consistency across the collection.

Structure and Form

One of the difficulties in putting together a collection of essays that move beyond typical categories of texts and broach new approaches to YA subgenres is finding a way to group those essays together with the same spirit of defiance of traditional approaches. Each essay in this collection combines critical theory, metanarrative frameworks, and comparative readings in creative and innovative ways. However, we have put these essays together into three major sections that allow overlapping conversations to emphasize and amplify the type of work that each essay performs on its own.

The first section, Defining Boundaries, groups together essays that collectively work to provide insight into the conventions of existing subgenres within the YA category. In identifying these often under-recognized subgenres and highlighting the overarching shape and themes found in many of the novels within a subgenre, these essays expand the scope of YA literature studies, both in terms of text selection and emerging theoretical frameworks. These essays focus on representative texts within an identified subgenre but are intended to provide analysis and theoretical frameworks that can be applied productively to existing and forthcoming texts within that subgenre.

Exploring the Genre Conventions of the YA Dystopian Trilogy as Twenty-First-Century Utopian Dreaming by Rebekah Fitzsimmons examines the popular format of the YA dystopian trilogy and, by considering the trilogy as a unified text, outlines the plot patterns and other genre conventions apparent in this form. Through a distant comparative reading of multiple trilogies, this essay argues that their pedagogical nature utilizes the liminal position of teens in society to advocate for rebellion and institutional overthrow in the pursuit of a utopian hope for a better future.

Oversharing on and off the Internet: Crossing from Digital to Print (and Back) in Young Adult Works Authored by YouTube Stars by Rachel Rickard Rebellino examines the nonfiction side of YA by analyzing the generic conventions of memoirs of young YouTube content creators and the challenges those creators face when trying to cross platforms from internet video into print book. In subverting the print is dead narrative by moving from new media to old, Rebellino traces the complex interplay between audiences, internet popularity, and bestsellerdom, as well as the different truths that emerge in text rather than video.

Paranormal Maturation: Uncanny Teenagers and Canny Killers by Rachel Dean-Ruzicka examines the trope of uncanny teens using extraordinary abilities to track and stop serial killers. Using the framework of Freud’s concept of the uncanny, Dean-Ruzicka unpacks the ways these teens use supernatural skills to do what the adults cannot: identify and track a serial killer, leading to atypical forms of maturation. The essay establishes how these teens often operate outside the law and outside conventional understandings of relationships to themselves and other people, creating a more complex, uncanny version of coming of age for readers to grapple with in this subgenre.

Fathoms Below: An In-Depth Examination of the Mermaid in Young Adult Literature, 2010–2015 by Amber Gray presents a compelling analysis of the figure of the mermaid within the subgenre of YA paranormal romances. Using a comparative framework, Gray outlines the major tropes present in these narratives and points to the value of the mermaid as a liminal figure with a fluid identity. Gray argues that these mermaid narratives often serve to demonstrate how larger political issues often affect teens, whether or not they choose to be involved in the political process, while the mermaid can serve as a valuable touchstone for teens grappling with their own multivalent identities.

"Who Are These Books Really For? Police-Violence YA, Black Youth Activism, and the Implied White Audience by Kaylee Mootz analyzes the emerging subgenre that addresses police violence, Black activist movements like Black Lives Matter and #TakeAKnee, and structural racism through a youth-oriented lens. Mootz lays out the emerging conventions of this subgenre and common subject matter, such as structural racism and the power of protest. Mootz also closely examines the didactic lessons of these texts and demonstrates how many of the teaching moments" in these texts address a majority-white audience unfamiliar with the concepts of white privilege and structural inequality. Mootz’s chapter encourages scholars and educators to pay close attention to which characters are permitted to grow and change and which are called upon to speak out in the aftermath of police violence, especially as the genre continues to expand.

The second section, Expanding Boundaries, brings together essays that explore collisions of subject, theme, and character in ways that challenge the limits of long-established genres. While the essays in the previous section provide insight into the rules that define (emerging) genres, the essays in this section look at texts that question the rules as we know them. The analyses in this category include critiques of form, representation, and genre that combine to present a nuanced portrait of contemporary YA literature’s capability for invention and exploration.

New Directions for Old Roads: Rewriting the Young Adult Road Trip Story by Jason Vanfosson maps the very American genre of road trip stories onto twenty-first-century contexts. Using queer theory to address the limits imposed on women, young adults of color, and LGBTQIA+ teens in the face of road trips, Vanfosson’s essay argues that the narrative of the open road as a space for transformation and self-discovery is often reserved for cis-het white males.

New Heroines in Old Skins: Fairy Tale Revisions in Young Adult Dystopian Literature by Jill Coste examines YA dystopian fairy tale retellings through a feminist lens of embodiment and political engagement. Coste links the didactic nature of fairy tales and dystopias and notes the sense of agency that allows teen readers to imagine a different, more hopeful future while calling them to engage in activism in the current moment. The value in examining this popular subgenre of YA lies in its often subversive reworking of common tropes, both from fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty and broader problematic social conventions that perpetuate rape culture narratives.

Manufacturing Manhood: Young Adult Fiction and Masculinity(ies) in the Twenty-First Century by Tom Jesse and Heidi Jones examines the crisis in masculinity lamented in twenty-first-century popular media and the ways in which contemporary YA novels work to reimagine and redefine masculinity outside or above the toxic frameworks that came before. Framed through a critical literacy lens, this essay examines varied portraits of what it means to ‘be a man’ in the twenty-first century, as depicted in contemporary YA texts. They note that previous traditional markers of American masculinity, such as physical strength, competitiveness, and self-reliance, are increasingly challenged through the denigration of old stereotypes, like the dude bro, and celebrated new ideals, such as the sensitive thinker.

Mythopoeic YA: Worlds of Possibility by Leah Phillips demonstrates how the liminal nature of YA, neither adult nor children’s literature, opens a space for fantastic world building that can disrupt the hegemonic concepts of traditional fantasy. Phillips argues that contemporary mythopoeic YA, written by women primarily for girls, offers unparalleled avenues for increasing diversity and inclusivity. Phillips traces the evolution of mythopoeic YA from its founding mother Tamora Pierce, who challenged the notion of the typical male hero and quest in her series. Phillips locates and analyzes a number of newer series that further challenge the typical pseudomedieval European fantasy setting by locating stories in fantastic worlds based on Nigerian, Middle Eastern, Japanese, and Southeast Asian cultures and including characters from a wide range of races, religions, classes, sexualities, and physical abilities.

The third and final section, Revealing Boundaries, works to critique existing categories by tracing often unspoken genre norms and pushing back against expectations. Some of these essays offer much-needed updates to the critical treatment of existing genres, while others point to explicit gaps in both the texts themselves and the critical treatment of those texts. While the first section explores conventions and tropes that help fit YA texts into various subgenres, and the second section argues for the expansion of restrictions that have previously been taken for granted, this section works to illuminate boundaries that previously may have been hidden or overlooked by previous analyses. These essays seek to place unspoken assumptions into a theoretical framework that will enable future critical conversations.

‘Tell Me Who I Am’: An Investigation of Cultural Authenticity in YA Disability Peritexts by Megan Brown uses a disability studies framework to examine the ways in which peritextual elements like biographies, dedications, and author’s notes can build a narrative of authenticity, on a spectrum from personal experience to carefully researched to minimal exposure. Brown argues for the importance of authentic representation of disability as well as an increased recognition of the importance of accurate representation of not only the experience but also the meanings of the lived experiences in order to avoid the perpetuation of negative stereotypes and inaccurate understandings.

In "Reimagining Forever …: The Marriage Plot in Recent Young Adult Literature, Sara K. Day examines the trope of early marriage in YA romance novels, maintaining the concept of permanence of young and even first love as the desired outcome of adolescence. Using a postfeminist lens, Day analyzes the conversations and cultural contexts surrounding marriage in the twenty-first century. She notes that many YA novels (mis)use classic marriage plot" novels such as Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and Pride and Prejudice as templates, while ignoring or erasing the subversive elements of those narratives in order to privilege a traditional upper-class heteronormative understanding of marriage as the natural happy ending of a romance.

A timely essay, Roxanne Harde’s No Accident, No Mistake: Acquaintance Rape in Recent YA Novels, examines the subgenre of YA texts detailing the rape of the main character and the aftermath. Harde examines the pedagogical messages of novels with regard to speaking up about versus staying quiet about the assault, tracing the narrative tropes from Laurie Halse Anderson’s seminal Speak through to more recent additions to the subgenre. The essay also examines narratives that touch on the point of view of the rapist and the important work of addressing the messages rape culture instills in young men as a means of combatting the ongoing issues of acquaintance rape and sexual assault.

Eliminating Extermination, Fostering Existence: Diverse Dystopian Fiction and Female Adolescent Identity by S. R. Toliver engages in a much-needed exploration of the popular subgenre of dystopian texts with female main characters; her intersectional examination of female protagonists of color provides readers with a valuable resource for introducing diverse texts to readers and classrooms. By disrupting the hyper-canon