Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction (Children's Literature Association Series). This item is unavailable.Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction (Children's Literature Association Series)

Contributions by Megan Brown, Jill Coste, Sara K. Day, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Amber Gray, Roxanne Harde, Tom Jesse, Heidi Jones, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, Leah Phillips, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, S. R. Toliver, Jason Vanfosson, Sarah E. Whitney, and Casey Alane Wilson

While critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first-century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, classroom materials and scholarship have remained static in focus and slight in scope. Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hate U Give overwhelm conversations among scholars and critics—but these are far from the only texts in need of analysis.

Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction offers a necessary remedy to this limiting perspective, bringing together essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types that have until now been overlooked. The collection tackles a diverse range of topics—modern updates to the marriage plot; fairy tale retellings in dystopian settings; stories of extrajudicial police killings and racial justice. The approaches are united, though, by a commitment to exploring the large-scale generic and theoretical structures at work in each set of texts.

As a collection, Beyond the Blockbusters is an exciting entryway into a field that continues to grow and change even as its works captivate massive audiences. It will prove a crucial addition to the library of any scholar or instructor of young adult literature.

Rebekah Fitzsimmons is assistant director of the Writing and Communication Program and a Marion L. Brittain Post-Doctoral Fellow in the School of Language, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has a PhD in English from the University of Florida and specializes in children's and young adult literature studies.

Casey Alane Wilson is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology who studies young adult literature, digital media, and popular culture. In addition to her research and teaching, she is an author of young adult fiction under the name Casey Alane.