It is a bit surreal when a project you have been working on for years is finally ready for public consumption. The edited collection that I have been working on with Casey Wilson for the past 800 million years (or 4 years, depending on your perspective) is finally live in the University Press of Mississippi catalog. The book is scheduled to be published April 2020, so you can’t quite hold it in your hand yet, but it does look and sound very real from the catalog description.
From the catalog:
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.
You can find the complete University Press of Mississippi Spring-Summer 2020 catalog here!
Rebekah Fitzsimmons 