Between Youth and Adulthood: Young Adult and New Adult Literature

A new genre of literature that situates itself between adolescent and adult literature, "new adult" literature reflects conventions associated with both adult and young adult literature. Characterized in part by its direct address to a readership understood in demographic terms and with an origin story similar to that of young adult literature, new adult literature provides us with an opportunity to test and refine our developing definition of young adult literature, but also to consider how both genres function, exist, and are distinguished within a greater landscape of literatures constituted in terms of their relationship to the audiences that these same literatures work to reflect, address, and construct.