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Introduction: time of turmoil /Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva --1.Adolescence and the natural world in young adult fiction /David Whitley --2.Nationhood, struggle, and identity /Elia Michelle Lafuente --3.Transgression and transition /Georgie Horrell --4.Romance, dystopia, and the hybrid child /Clémentine Beauvais --5.Cross-dressing and performativity /Nicole Brugger-Dethmers --6.Monstrous bodies, writing the incestuously abused adolescent body /Lydia Kokkola --7."The beat of your heart": music in young adult literature and culture /Karen Coats --8.Emotional connection: representation of emotions in young adult literature /Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer --9.Brian and behaviour: the coherence of teenage responses to young adult literature /Shirley Brice Heath and Jennifer Lynn Wolf. 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
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