Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture: The Emergent Adult ed. by Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva (review)

Even before receiving my copy of Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva’s book, I was eager to read what these two scholars had to say about the genre of adolescent literature. Their edited collection does not disappoint, as it provides an accessible and intriguing look at the way adolescence, and thus the portrayal of adolescence in literature, functions as a metaphor for political and social turmoil. Read individually, these essays elucidate contemporary texts like Sapphire’s Push, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Meg Rosoff ’s How I Live Now, and (not surprisingly) Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. Read as a whole, the volume serves as a grand exploration of how contemporary authors, readers, and texts negotiate adolescence, adolescent experiences, and adolescent literature.

Adolescence is a time of turmoil and rebellion—this assertion serves as the starting point for most of the chapters in Hilton and Nikolajeva’s work, and is highlighted in the title of their introduction: “Time of Turmoil.” They begin by tracing the way adolescence has become a metaphor for cultural and political “storm and stress,” and vice versa (2). Explaining the impetus for the book, they argue that “[i]f Young Adult literature and culture can link society’s turbulence, its most pressing and disturbing issues, with the adolescent’s quest for identity in coming of age, then we consider it crucial to uncover the ways it carries through this purpose and to ask to what extent it erects new structures of feeling for its readers and critics” (9). If we are to accept that there is a relationship between discourses of turmoil and angst and the genre of young adult literature, then we have to trace how this functions within the fiction that is read by and marketed to adolescents. As such, the twelve scholars writing here both reify and take issue with the functions of this metaphor of turmoil within young adult literature.

The nine essays included may be categorized into three sections. The first three chapters investigate the politics of space and setting, and one of the more pleasant surprises found within these pages is the presence and discussion of international and global literature in these early essays. Specifically, Elia Michelle Lafuente and Georgie Horrell focus their arguments on Caribbean American and South African characters, respectively. Lafuente argues that the political upheaval within Caribbean countries like the Dominican Republic and Haiti mirrors the experiences of the adolescent characters within testimonios, narratives that tell the story of individuals as well as of the community (35). Horrell maps the colonization of South Africa and subsequent racial and socioeconomic tensions onto the adolescent experience, asserting that

The Young Adult postcolonial novel holds a key position in the canon of fiction written for adolescents. The distinct relevance of the liberatory text for readers whose own path is one of progress from a position of submission to (adult) authority towards one of attainment of enhanced agency and independence is clear.

(59)

The second section of the collection posits the body as a cause of and site for turmoil. Clémentine Beauvais, for instance, makes a strong argument in “Romance, Dystopia, and the Hybrid Child” that the rebellious act of teen pregnancy positions the teen as outside the norms of community but also forces her back into the adult world by causing her to adopt the role of parent. Beauvais’s article goes on to examine the hybrid children born in Twilight and Noughts and Crosses, contrasting the romantic and divine-like Renesmee to the transgressive Callie. Whether the author addresses the physiological changes of the body (Beauvais), the appearance of the body and its clothing (Nicole Brugger-Dethmers), or the trauma that is forced upon bodies (Lydia Kokkola), all three of these essays navigate the startling ways authors write political and social turmoil onto the bodies of adolescent characters.

The final three chapters in this book address adolescent...