Young Adult Gothic Fiction

* Focus on young adult literature - This focus on young adult literature means that this book expands scholarship specifically in this area. * Focus on the Gothic for young people - Gothic texts are very popular in children's and young adult literature, but there hasn't been a lot of scholarship on the Gothic for adolescents. This book expands our knowledge of how the Gothic intersects with young adult literature. * Includes coverage of YA fiction from the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a range of genres that intersect with the Gothic (including historical fiction and fairy tale), as well as forms such as the short story and graphic novel.

This collection examines young adult Gothic fiction to demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic in texts for young people signals anxieties about, and hopes for, young people in the twenty-first century.This collection is the first to focus exclusively on twenty-first-century young adult Gothic fiction. The essays demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic signals anxieties about (and hopes for) young people in the twenty-first century. Changing conceptions of young adults as liminal figures, operating between the modes of child and adult, can be mobilised when combined with Gothic spaces and concepts in texts for young people. In young adult Gothic literature, the crossing of boundaries typical of the Gothic is often motivated by a heterosexual romance plot, in which the human or monstrous female protagonist desires a boy who is not her ‘type’. Additionally, as the Gothic works to define what it means to be human – particularly in relation to gender, race, and identity – the volume also examines how contemporary shifts and flashpoints in identity politics are being negotiated under the metaphoric cloak of monstrosity.