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While differences and conflicts between younger and older generations have been frequently studied in children’s literature criticism, this book breaks new ground by arguing for the fundamental role of children’s and YA literature and film in propagating and facilitating a culture of generational interconnections. The collection highlights the potential of children’s literature studies as a site of intergenerational solidarity and opens possibilities for a new socially significant inquiry into the culture of childhood that addresses urgent challenges posed by the rapid aging of the global population. The sixteen contributions—by international scholars from Belgium, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the UK and the US—explore representations of intergenerational relations in classical texts and contemporary ones to show the importance of intergenerational bonds for the sustainability and welfare of societies. Some of the contributions also focus on writing children’s literature as an intergenerational practice of empathy between adult authors and young audiences.

Steve Ditko (1927–2018) is one of the most important contributors to American comic books. As the cocreator of Spider-Man and sole creator of Dr. Strange, Ditko made an indelible mark on American popular culture. Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity resets the conversation about his heady and powerful work. Always inward facing, Ditko's narratives employed superhero and supernatural fantasy in the service of self-examination, and with characters like the Question, Mr. A, and Static, Ditko turned ordinary superhero comics into philosophic treatises. Many of Ditko's philosophy-driven comics show a clear debt to ideas found in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Unfortunately, readers often reduce Ditko's work to a mouthpiece for Rand's vision. Mysterious Travelers unsettles this notion by theorizing a major strand of liberal thought yet to be explored in academic discourse. Conscripting the popular mind power and New Thought movements into the rhetoric of libertarianism and later, Reagan-era neoliberalism, Ditko’s work provides access to a “mystic liberalism” that leverages the so-called power of positive thinking for political and philosophic aims. Mysterious Travelers also provides a critical reexamination of Ditko’s “right to kill” for fictional characters as well as significant insights into the racial history of Dr. Strange.

Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process explores the ways in which cross-cultural adaptations often stage a collusion between competing cultural capital. The collusion conceals and reveals commonalities and differences between these cultural traditions before giving way to the differences that can distinguish one textual expression from another, just as it ultimately distinguishes one set of readers from another. An adaptation of any sort, but especially those that cross accepted stereotypes, or geographic or political boundaries, provide spectators space to negotiate attitudes and ideas that might otherwise lay latent in the text. Spectators are left to parse through each, often with special attention to the differences that exist between two expressions. Each new set of readers, each generation, distinguishes itself from an earlier set of readers, even as they exist along the same family tree. Given enough time, some new shared organizing strategy emerges until a new encounter or new expression of a text restarts the adaptational process every adaptation can trigger. Taken together, the chapters in Next Generation Adaptation each argue that the texts they consider foreground the kinds of space that exists between texts, between political commitments, between ethical obligations that every filmic text can open when the text is experienced as an adaptation. The chapters esteem the expansive dialogue adaptations accelerate when they realize their capacity to bring together two or more texts, two or more peoples, two or more ideologies without allowing one expression to erase another.

Peculiar Whiteness argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as ‘white trash’ have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety-inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or with other troubling conditions such as physical difference. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., ‘white trash,’ tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, the book analyzes how we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to re-categorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of ‘white trash.’

This book considers the recent surge in queer young adult literature publishing and argues that this explosion of queer representation has prompted new forms of longstanding cultural anxieties about adolescent sexuality. In particular, critics of queer texts for young people seem concerned with the following questions: what makes for a good “coming out” story? Will increased queer representation in popular culture teach adolescents the right lessons, and help queer youth live better, happier lives? What if these stories harm young people instead of helping them? Although these concerns spring from a particular contemporary moment, Mason illustrates how the history of adolescence is itself a history of anxiety, and how young adult literature emerged, in part, as a way of managing various cultural and social anxieties. Mason suggests that “queer YA” is usefully understood as a body of trans-media texts with blurry boundaries, one that coheres around affect—specifically, anxiety—instead of content. To clarify this point, Mason draws on criticism about a range of texts for and about queer adolescents, including an assortment of young adult books; Caper in the Castro, the first-ever queer video game; online fan communities; and popular television series Glee and Big Mouth. Themes that generate the most anxiety about adolescent culture, Mason argues—queer visibility, risk-taking, HIV/AIDS, dystopia and horror, the promise that “It Gets Better” and the threat that it might not—challenge us to rethink how we read and engage with young people’s media.

Robert Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self is the first monograph to explore the intersection between Crumb’s love of literature, his search for the meaning of life and the ways he connects his own autobiography with the themes of the writers he has admired. Crumb’s comics from the beginning reflected the fact that he was a voracious reader from childhood and perused a variety of authors including Charles Dickens, J.D. Salinger, and, during his adolescence, Beat writers like Jack Kerouac. He was profoundly influenced by music, especially the blues, and the ecstatic power of music appears in his artwork throughout his career. The first chapter explores the ways Robert Crumb illustrates works by William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Charles Bukowski. The book continues with individual chapters devoted to Crumb’s illustrations of biographies of blues musicians Jelly Roll Morton and Charley Patton; Philip K. Dick; Jean-Paul Sartre; Franz Kafka; and concludes with an exploration of Crumb’s illustrations to the book of Genesis. In all his drawings accompanying literary texts, Crumb returns to a number of key themes regarding his personal spiritual quest such as suffering and existential solitude; the search for romantic and sexual love; the impact of entheogens such as LSD on his quest for answers to his cosmic questions. We discover that Crumb gradually embraces a mysticism rooted in his studies of Gnosticism. In the final chapter on the book of Genesis, readers may observe the ways Crumb continues his critique of monotheistic religion in a variety of subtle ways. Robert Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self concludes with an Epilogue which discusses Crumb’s present-day life in France and the ways he has continued to engage with spiritual and philosophical themes in his later work.

Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, American youth culture and literature grew up with Puerto Rico. The contemporary US tradition of youth literature and media, along with how young people, as authors, narrate their part in social struggle, is inseparable from Puerto Rican thought and writing. Youth literature, media, and youth-led movements have played a prominent role in portraying the political and cultural relationship between the US and Puerto Rico—from the US acquisition to Puerto Rican writer’s pleas for a place in US letters and culture. During the early colonial encounter, children’s books were among the first kinds of literature produced by US writers introducing the new colony, its people, and the US’s role as a twentieth-century colonial power to the American public. Subsequently, youth literature and media was an important tool of Puerto Rican cultural and educational elite institutions and Puerto Rican revolutionary thought for negotiating US assimilation and upholding a strong Latin American, Caribbean national stance.