ABSTRACT
THE RECENT RISE OF YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE Today’s teens have a seemingly endless supply of literature to help them grapple with issues from suicide to surviving high school cliques. In the past decade, the field of young adult literature has experienced a quantitative and qualitative shift. Michael Cart (2005), writing on behalf of the American Library Association, has reported that,
Book publishers have quickly responded to the teenage population growth that began in the early nineties. An astounding array of texts for young adults can now be found on the shelves of bookstores and libraries, accompanied by a deluge of websites, blogs, booklists, fan sites, and other Internet resources related to young adult literature. According to Cart (2005), there has been a 25% increase in the publication, and a 23% rise in the sale of books for young adults from 1995 to 2005. These changes in the marketing of young adult literature have been accompanied by changes in the style, format, and features of the books themselves.
