A Review of Youth Cultures: Texts, Images and Identity (Book Review)

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article: Youth culture and children's literature have had little to say to each other since teenagers officially came to public recognition in the 1950s. There are obvious reasons for this silence - not least of the fact that youth culture is definitionally engaged in plotting a trajectory away from childhood. Additionally, children's literature's long association with education, acculturation and approved behaviour also marks it as a body antithetical to much of what youth culture stands for. Yet academics of children's literature invariably embrace texts for and about adolescence in their spheres of interest. YA novels are included in course syllabi, and some challenging literary and cultural analyses of fiction for teenagers have emerged in recent years, spearheaded by Robyn McCallum's Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction (1999). Indeed, a number of children's literature scholars have done significant work on the formats and narratives adolescents encounter both outside mainstream culture and beyond the pages of conventional print-based texts. However, the key texts in youth culture have tended to have produced by those in cultural studies and the social sciences, who often seem unaware of the place of fiction in youth culture - unless it is popular fiction in the form of comics and magazines