Writing Youth: Young Adult Fiction as Literacy Sponsorship

(Hardback)

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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 peoples multiliterate media making in response to their favorite texts and stories. As such, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned about young peoples literacies and the relationship between literacy development and the culture industries.

Reviews

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 extendor spreadacross 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. -- Michele J. Knobel, Montclair State University
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. -- Eric Tribunella, University of Southern Mississippi
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 Alexanders 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. -- Bronwyn T. Williams, University of Louisville

Author Bio

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