The Limits of Childhood: Young Adult and Crossover Fiction

U.C. Knoepflmacher and Mitzi Myers (1997: vii) argue that all works of fiction written for young readers by adults are inherently dialogic because they ‘create a colloquy between past and present selves’. This chapter will, however, be confined to a review of critical approaches to fiction for young adults (YAs) which has been perceived by gatekeepers to have challenged the limits of acceptability in terms of subject matter and style (Beckett (ed.) 1999; Trites 2000), and/or which has attracted an adult readership (Falconer 2009). While Rachel Falconer suggests that cross-reading (defined by her as adults reading books aimed at young readers) is a relatively new phenomenon which emerged in the decade leading up to the millennium, recent anthologies of essays that focus on the work of pioneering writers of YA fiction from the mid-twentieth century onwards, most notably that of the controversial American writer Robert Cormier (Gavin (ed.) 2012), lend support to the view that YA fiction has from its inception blurred boundaries in terms of readership, subject matter and style.