Writing Youth

Writing Youth: Young Adult Fiction as Literacy Sponsorship shows how many young adult novels model for young people ways to manage the various media tools that surround them. Jonathan Alexander examines not only young adult texts and their media ecologies but also young people’s multiliterate media making in response to their favorite texts and stories. As such, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned about young people’s literacies and the relationship between literacy development and the culture industries.

This book is a much-needed “coming of age” account of young adult literature that explicitly recognizes how books are not bound by their covers, but extend—or spread—across a range of commercial commodities and youth-produced texts and practices. Alexander provides compelling analyses that identify the current profound commodification of reading, while at the same time clearly point to spaces and networks within which youth themselves are engaging in literacy practices that are active, productive, and deeply satisfying. This is must-read book for everyone who works with youth, in education, or in the media industry., Jonathan Alexander offers a timely and keen analysis of how young adult literature promotes forms of adolescent literacy shaped by market forces. Writing Youth analyzes contemporary YA fiction as an important route to understanding adolescent identity, youth culture, and literacy education, and it explores the fascinating ways young people create their own multimedia responses to the products produced for them by adults., Anyone wanting a more nuanced understanding of how literacy works in the daily lives of young people should read this incisive exploration of the ways in which Young Adult Fiction shapes important cultural perceptions of technology, institutions, and identity. Jonathan Alexander’s exploration of some of the most popular narratives in contemporary culture is a reminder of what we gain when we pay attention to, and take seriously, the complex relationships between young people and the popular culture texts they value.

Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English and director of the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication at University of California, Irvine.