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This chapter first addresses the education system as a site where Shakespeare is aimed at teenagers with strategies of making the plays relevant to teenagers. Then it considers the primacy of Romeo and Juliet as the emblematic teen Shakespeare work. It also deals with Shakespeare for teenagers in two key appropriative markets: cinema and young adult novels. Teenagers encounter Shakespeare in the classroom as part of their secondary education. Since the sixties, Romeo and Juliet has achieved primacy in secondary education, presumably because of its teenaged heroine (and often-presented as teenaged hero, though Romeo is most likely in his early twenties and would have been played in the Lord Chamberlain's men by an adult actor). The adolescent's fear of Shakespeare and the concern that the plays might be boring or inaccessible are both removed by ensuring that Shakespeare only engages issues of concern to them.

This chapter examines the history of children's and young adult fiction in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific. During the mid-twentieth century, fiction for the young in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand did not yet occupy a prominent place. In Australia, most children's fiction was produced and imported by British publishers. In Canada, markets and children's reading practices were dominated by American and (to a lesser extent) British imports until 1975. In Australia and New Zealand, children's novels began to gather strength in the late 1950s and 1960s. The chapter shows how the significance of children's fiction in the project of nation-building became to be recognised as a result of the growth of the educational publishing industry following World War II. It also considers the transnational relationships that pervade children's and young adult novels from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific.

This chapter focuses on a trend that psychoanalyst Elizabeth Baer calls “literature of atrocity’ for children”, which is Holocaust centered and influenced by the themes and conceits of psychoanalysis. Trauma writing is a combination of literary and psychological discourse, in which certain kinds of trauma takes priority. The chapter examines young adult Holocaust novels styled after fairy tales, and picturebooks about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Young adult Holocaust narrative marks trauma as having happened elsewhere in time or space, while the 9/11 picturebooks construct Americans as innocent victims or “infantile citizens.”

After World War II, science-fiction authors found lucrative side gigs in writing fiction for young people. Before “young adult” books were a fixed category, authors like Robert Heinlein wrote stories about space for middle-grade readers, most of whom were male. This chapter looks at Heinlein’s juvenile fiction published by Scribner’s, and shows how his work reinforced a vision of scientific masculinity.

This chapter explores how narrative intimacy comes to be developed in contemporary literature for adolescent women, focusing specifically on the process of disclosure as a means of creating and maintaining intimate ties. This is particularly pertinent in the present discussion because narrative intimacy relies on a narrator’s willingness and ability to disclose to the reader thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The chapter also examines other types of sharing, such as sharing physical space (as in sexual intimacy) or sharing experiences (a common aspect of friendships and romantic relationships alike). In turn, it considers the process of learning how and when to conceal information—even within apparently intimate relationships—as messages regarding disclosure are necessarily tied up with those regarding discretion.

This chapter discusses novels that provide insight into a larger consequence of cultural demands about adolescent women and intimacy, namely that by discouraging young women from exploring or expressing their sexual desires before they are “ready,” cultural demands deny them the possibility of fully engaging in the sort of emotional intimacy deemed necessary for sexual relationships. These novels include Sarah Dessen’s Someone Like You, Kristen Tracy’s Lost It, Sara Zarr’s Story of a Girl, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga.

This chapter examines how explicit violations of intimacy—namely, abuse and assault—challenge both narrators’ and readers’ concepts of narrative intimacy. Examining novels in which the narrator is either the victim of or a witness to such violations, it considers the ways in which narrators use narrative intimacy as a means of reclaiming an understanding of and control over intimacy. These novels include Deb Caletti’s Honey, Baby, Sweetheart, Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland, Niki Burnham’s Sticky Fingers, Louisa Luna’s Brave New Girl, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, and Courtney Summers’ Cracked Up to Be.

This chapter examines one common location for disclosure—the diary, which has come to be closely associated with adolescent womanhood in contemporary American culture—and to the ways in which fictional adolescent women diarists actively anticipate readers in spite of the ostensibly private nature of the diary form. It discusses contemporary American novels that adopt the form of a diary, journal, or notebook intended for the purpose of private disclosure and secret keeping. These include Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries series, Megan McCafferty’s Jessica Darling series, Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Don’t You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey, Julie Halpern’s Get Well Soon, and Alyson Noel’s Cruel Summer.

This chapter discusses the novels that provide helpful insights into questions of intimacy through their representations of the relationships between adolescent women as well as their construction of relationships between narrator and reader that mimic, reflect, or complicate understandings of intimate friendships. These include Sarah Dessen’s Keeping the Moon, Natasha Friend’s Perfect, Stephanie Hemphill’s Things Left Unsaid, Siobhan Vivian’s A Little Friendly Advice, Lizabeth Zindel’s The Secret Rites of Social Butterflies, and E. Lockhart’s Ruby Oliver series. Although these novels approach their representations of friendships in a variety of ways, each offers a view of the often fundamental role that these relationships play in the experiences of adolescent women. Each novel also constructs the role of the reader as friend, even as the construction of this role may draw attention to or deny constructions of disclosure within friendships as difficult or dangerous.

This chapter considers the production history of Jeff Smith's Bone, a 1,332-page epic comics text that has been published in multiple editions designed to appeal to both children and adult readers. It argues that the blending of disparate genres, mediums, narratives, conventions, and illustrative styles that characterizes Bone—telling an epic narrative in the comics medium; Smith's use of his training as an animator to create perfectly timed gags on paper instead of film; interspersing slapstick comedy with a dark adventure narrative and meditations on dreams and dreaming; making a pretty girl an epic hero, her grandmother a warrior, and her great aunt a powerful villain in a literary form long dominated by male heroes who are often preserving the honor of princesses in need of rescue or protection; and Smith's use of iconic figures instead of realistically drawn characters to tell a serious story—is what allows Bone to take several different physical forms and to attract a broad audience of readers from different age groups.

This chapter demonstrates the ability of comics to transcend the limitations of language in narratives about mental illness by focusing first on David Heatley's three-part comic, “Overpeck,” and second on Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole. “Overpeck” tells the story of a young girl, Sadie Grace, who lives with post-traumatic stress disorder, a complex mental disorder that occurs as a result of trauma. Swallow Me Whole is a long-form comic that brilliantly uses the combination of text and image to convey the experience of two teenage siblings with schizophrenia. While neither of these texts is directly marketed as young adult fiction, both feature adolescent protagonists with experiences that are relatable and understandable for young readers who would benefit greatly from such authentic depictions of mental illness.

This chapter proposes a new application of the comics term “masked” to backgrounds rather than to characters. The traditional usage of the concept of masking involves the placement of simplistically drawn characters against “unusually realistic backgrounds,” which allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world. In contrast, the people in Shaun Tan's The Arrival are rendered in photorealistic detail. These human characters are so clearly unique that the reader is not encouraged to easily mask him or herself in them. Instead, the characters' highly realistic appearance helps readers gain purchase and a sense of the familiar in a world that is often strange, intriguing, and unfamiliar. This is a new application of the principle of comics masking, wherein Tan's graphic narrative invites “arrivees” to explore the way hyper-realistic characters are incorporated within attention-grabbing, masked spatial contexts.

This chapter presents a reading of Gene Luen Yang's two-part epic Boxers & Saints. In the novel, the fierce yet compassionate female warrior Mei-wen asks Boxer Rebellion leader Little Bao, “What is China but a people and their stories? ” (Boxers 312). Within the plurality of Mei-wen's rhetorical question is the implication of a multitude of stories, leading the words to be a self-referential gesture to the dual narratives of Boxers & Saints itself. The chapter first explores James Phelan's concept of narratives of contest before looking into examples of how Yang structures the narrative to highlight the synthetic component in aid of his authorial purpose. It then reflects on the complication of Yang's choice to conclude the narrative in epilogue. The chapter closes by returning to Yang's rhetorical purpose and situating it, as well as Phelan's contest of narratives, in connection to dialectics.