Project MUSE®: Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2009) through vol. 17 (2025)Latest Articles: Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, CulturesTWOProject MUSE®Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures1920-261X1920-2601Latest articles in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editorial Introduction: Gendered YA Shakespeare—Penguin 'Staged' Series
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979372
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The first volume of each issue of this journal falls in the Northern Hemisphere summer, meaning this volume marks a year of my preoccupation with a series that genders Shakespeare's plays for a female YA readership, reading for pleasure. Last summer, I walked into the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust bookshop, in Stratford-upon-Avon, and was drawn towards a display of books with bold covers. Their languid, art-nouveau lines portrayed pairs or triads of characters in eye-watering colours. They somewhat resembled Alphonse Mucha prints, but with his earthy palette exchanged for high-contrast combinations: acid green, neon pink, and livid purple with red, orange and yellow. Characters entwined in embraces: couples were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500/image/coversmallEditorial Introduction: Gendered YA Shakespeare—Penguin 'Staged' Series2026-01-13text/htmlen-USEditorial Introduction: Gendered YA Shakespeare—Penguin 'Staged' Series2026-01-132026TWOProject MUSE®547292026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-13YouTube Read-Alouds: A Case Study in Picture Books
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979373
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This article considers picture-book "read-aloud" channels on YouTube. Unlike other "BookTube" channels that focus on reviews and recommendations, these channels consist of adults reading and displaying other people's copyrighted stories in their entirety, sometimes with the addition of graphics or sound effects but often with no transformation of the original work beyond the reader's dramatized voice. Nevertheless, these channels can garner millions of views and have turned YouTube into perhaps the largest online repository through which picture books can be accessed in their entirety without paywalls. Despite this prevalence, very little literature exists on YouTube read-alouds. Research on BookTubers focuses on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500/image/coversmallYouTube Read-Alouds: A Case Study in Picture Books2026-01-13text/htmlen-USYouTube Read-Alouds: A Case Study in Picture Books2026-01-132026TWOProject MUSE®886262026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-13"Right Through" Gen X to Gen Z: Adaptations of Alanis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill and the Performance of Intergenerational Solidarity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979374
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On 24 August 2015—during the "1989" World Tour that propelled her to super-stardom—singer Taylor Swift invited a very special guest to share the stage with her. As she paced the stage in anticipation of her guest, Swift characterized her in the following way:[She] inspired a generation of confessional singer-song-writers who all of a sudden made you feel like you could actually say all the feelings that you have, you could actually sing about your real life, you could put detail into it, you could get really, really mad if you want to… So many female singer-songwriters of my generation, including myself, would not write the way that we do without her and her music.This special guest was none other than Alanis
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500/image/coversmall"Right Through" Gen X to Gen Z: Adaptations of Alanis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill and the Performance of Intergenerational Solidarity2026-01-13text/htmlen-US"Right Through" Gen X to Gen Z: Adaptations of Alanis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill and the Performance of Intergenerational Solidarity2026-01-132026TWOProject MUSE®854762026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-13Reading Consent through the "First Kiss" in Popular Young Adult Fantasy Novels
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979375
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Young adult (YA) literature has long been understood as a space for encountering and examining social and cultural ideas.1 As the issues pertinent to young people have shifted, genres of YA have followed these trends. While YA has been "consistently cited" as a source of "important" information about sexuality and romance, consideration of the more problematic relationships is needed too (Brown et al. 1019). Following the #MeToo movement and the increased focus on confronting sexual harassment, young people have been looking for ways to explore intimacy, sexual relationships, consent, and sexual violence (Ollis and Dyson; Carmody and Willis). YA fantasy books have become a popular site for this exploration, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500/image/coversmallReading Consent through the "First Kiss" in Popular Young Adult Fantasy Novels2026-01-13text/htmlen-USReading Consent through the "First Kiss" in Popular Young Adult Fantasy Novels2026-01-132026TWOProject MUSE®765052026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-13Black Youth Reading for Pleasure in Alternative Spaces
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979376
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Globalization as well as advanced communication technologies, including the internet, have impacted the lives of Black youth in multiple ways (Jenkins; Mackey). Cross-cultural exchanges promote alternative perspectives and representations. These factors have implications for identity formation and Black youth engagement with material culture. This article is based on a qualitative participatory research study conducted with ten Canadian youth ages sixteen to twenty-five years from Caribbean and African Canadian backgrounds. All participate in the Black nerd (Blerd)1 subculture. Drawing on a number of theories, this study is informed by intersectional theory, postcolonial theory including Homi Bhabha's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500/image/coversmallBlack Youth Reading for Pleasure in Alternative Spaces2026-01-13text/htmlen-USBlack Youth Reading for Pleasure in Alternative Spaces2026-01-132026TWOProject MUSE®938522026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-13"Like That Between Two Humans": Girls Imagining Horses in Early Pony Stories
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979377
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In their review of girls' literature, Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig condemn pony stories, a genre they describe as "bound to bore anyone who is not fascinated by ponies" (353). Accounting for its popularity as due to an "odd tendency of certain young girls to identify strongly with horses" (354), they pathologize the genre's audience of young female readers. Similarly patronizing are analyses that draw parallels between the genre and pornography (Padel 54), or that interpret horses as symbols representing girls' subconscious heterosexual yearnings (Bettelheim 57). Other critics present more nuanced interpretations, suggesting that horses in children's and YA literature enable girls to embody both masculine and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500/image/coversmall"Like That Between Two Humans": Girls Imagining Horses in Early Pony Stories2026-01-13text/htmlen-US"Like That Between Two Humans": Girls Imagining Horses in Early Pony Stories2026-01-132026TWOProject MUSE®883262026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-13Studying Empowerment in English, French, and Persian Picture Books in the White Ravens Catalogues from 2015 to 2017
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979378
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It is true that much of children's literature and young adult literature is written and selected by adults, and all of it is published by adults (Nodelman, Hidden Adult). The role adults play can be so dominant that some critics like Perry Nodelman ("The Other") compare children's literature to imperialism or believe that children's literature is, in fact, "an adult practice with intentions toward child readers" (4). Jack Zipes (19) and Robert Sutherland (143) also believe that children's literature is a means for adults to convey their own idealized ideology to child readers. Finally, Jacqueline Rose's idea about adults' implicit desire for childhood creates an impossibility that underscores the power differential
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500/image/coversmallStudying Empowerment in English, French, and Persian Picture Books in the White Ravens Catalogues from 2015 to 20172026-01-13text/htmlen-USStudying Empowerment in English, French, and Persian Picture Books in the White Ravens Catalogues from 2015 to 20172026-01-132026TWOProject MUSE®1465342026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-13Alterity and Its Discontents
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979379
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In the introduction to Alt Kid Lit, the editors, Kenneth Kidd and Derritt Mason, quickly address the problem of the marginalization that they have taken on in producing this volume. Their goal is to "consider the overlooked materials and also challenge conceptualizations of and approaches to CYA [Children's and Young Adult Literature]" (3). Each of the essays in this collection engages in an analysis of what it means to be alternative—or, as Katherine Capshaw asks so eloquently in her essay in the volume, "alternative …to what?" (33)—and proble-matizes the label of alterity. The secret strength of Alt Kid Lit is that, in exploring the so-called alternative, this collection paints a portrait of what the Children's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500/image/coversmallAlterity and Its Discontents2026-01-13text/htmlen-USAlterity and Its Discontents2026-01-132026TWOProject MUSE®141422026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-13Figures of the Child at the End of the World
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979381
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There has been much debate about the politics of imagining futurities in apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian speculative fictions. From April Anson's problematization of settler apocalyptic visions of futures in which settler colonialism is slyly elided to interrogations of the suspect racial and class politics of some American dystopian novels for young adults (Basu; Couzelis), much important work has been done to expose the ways in which such fictions offer reassurances to white audiences that their privilege will persist in perpetuity. The figure of the child is instrumental in the many bleak and often post-racial narratives of the future produced in the global North. As a stand-in for the future, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500/image/coversmallFigures of the Child at the End of the World2026-01-13text/htmlen-USFigures of the Child at the End of the World2026-01-132026TWOProject MUSE®212582026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-13To Be a Dandelion: Coming-of-Age in a Canadian Graphic Novel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979382
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Canadian cartoonist Adam De Souza's new graphic novel, The Gulf, as this review explains, combines typical characteristics of coming-of-age stories with alternative ideas on growing up. The Gulf can be considered both a humanist and a posthumanist graphic novel, for while it focuses on the human, it also offers an ecocritical metaphor and enriches Western thinking with Indigenous myth.The Gulf is a compelling (anti-)coming-of-age story about seventeen-year-old Olivia (Oli) and her two best friends, Liam and Milo. Together, the three protagonists embody the manifold hardships of teenage life: Oli is bullied, feels like a misfit, and is intimate with Liam, which she later regrets. Liam refuses to take up a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500/image/coversmallTo Be a Dandelion: Coming-of-Age in a Canadian Graphic Novel2026-01-13text/htmlen-USTo Be a Dandelion: Coming-of-Age in a Canadian Graphic Novel2026-01-132026TWOProject MUSE®285352026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-13Astro Bot and Cross-Generational Play
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979383
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Digital gaming comprises a significant and increasing part of young people's media landscape. Games have a capacity to encourage curiosity and exploration, develop a sense of mastery (Raney, Smith, and Baker), and instruct via edutainment (Garcia-Fernandes and Medeiros; Harrington and O'Connell). Games that teach math or provide virtual walkthroughs of historical spaces have entered classrooms and are played on personal devices and consoles. Games can encourage prosocial development (Harrington and O'Connell; Klimmt and Harmann), empathy and emotional learning (Masterson and Kersey; Pryzbylski et al.), and narrative engagement (Fawcett; Mackey). While there are games designed for and marketed to young audiences
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/500/image/coversmallAstro Bot and Cross-Generational Play2026-01-13text/htmlen-USAstro Bot and Cross-Generational Play2026-01-132026TWOProject MUSE®322592026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-13