AustLit

'Recent years have seen the rise of crossover fiction that is marketed as young adult literature but also attracts a large adult audience. While critics have addressed this phenomenon as a symptom of the demise of traditional understandings of adulthood, they have not yet given sufficient attention to the innovative ways in which authors have responded to the crossover phenomenon by radically recasting adolescence. This article places Julia Kristeva’s work on the adolescent economy of writing in dialogue with the major works of Margo Lanagan, who is often described as the quintessential crossover writer. I show that Lanagan divorces adolescence from its traditional association with individualism and reimagines it as an age-independent psychological phenomenon that is characterised by an opening of the self to (non)human others and to the realm of the social. This notion of adolescence is not only the dominant theme in Lanagan’s writings, it also emerges as a style and disposition of her texts, generating new narrative possibilities in the management of plot, focalisation and voice. Reading Lanagan alongside Kristeva reveals the centrality of the aesthetic in Kristeva’s view of adolescence, while also allowing us to see possibilities in the adolescent economy of writing that remain underexplored in Kristeva’s work.' (Publication abstract)