Adult readers of young adult fiction : a bag of candy, a mid-life crisis or just literature?

I approach the subject of adult readers of young adult fiction through an analytical framework influenced by Cultural Studies, implicating that young adult fiction is caught up in a system of distinction between popular literature and high literature. I contrast this with theories that suggest that there has been a loosening of this hierarchy and that they now coexist, even borrowing features from one another. I also examine questions of ideology, namely the ideology of mass culture, the ironical attitude and the ideology of populism. I also use Andreas Huyssen’s theory of mass culture as a woman, seeing as popular literature often tends to be categorized with feminine traits. The empirical data is gathered through interviews and blogs, and the result gives us a complex image, where we can see both a quite strict hierarchy between high and low, as well as a loosening of this hierarchy. The informants all use the ideology of mass culture and the ideology of populism, which shows that seemingly opposing ideologies can coexist within the same individual. The informants also impose the characterization of young adult fiction as a woman, and many of them try to raise its low status. The result also shows that a discourse of age is working, a discourse that limits what is appropriate for an adult to read, and within this discourse there is little room for young adult fiction. But the main conclusion however is that the hierarchical system at least is beginning to lose its firm hold, which gives the individual greater potential to combine high and low