This chapter explores new developments in Latinx/Chicanx literature and thought, focusing on three interrelated issues. The chapter first discusses the adoption of the term “Latinx.” Then, the author highlights recent work from previously underrepresented communities, including Afro- Latinx, Central American-American, and undocumented writers. The chapter concludes with an examination of innovation in the realm of genre, including memoir and young adult literature. Throughout, particular attention is given to the role of gender and sexuality alongside questions of race and nationality.

Tracing its roots back to Romanticism and invoking a counter-realism associated with postmodernism, North American magical realism invites a variety of communities to resist inequity and oppressive rhetoric and culture and to revise historical, social and religious traditions. Its canon includes North American writers as diverse as Toni Morrison; Latina authors Cristina García, Ana Castillo and Julia Alvarez; feminist magical realists Laurie Foos and Aimee Bender; Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch; and indigenous authors Louise Erdrich, Thomas King and James Welch. A new wave of writers drawing upon magical realism – including Kelly Link, David Levithan, Micah Dean Hicks, Anna-Marie McLemore and Leslye Walton, and often using young adult literature – continues to redefine 'American-ness'. Magical realism carves out space for developing better understandings of established and new (or newly acknowledged) communities, allowing mainstream and disenfranchised authors alike – bound by geography, race, gender or other collective categorizations of identity – entry into the main discourse.

This chapter addresses the history, evolution, and status of Irish texts for young people as well as trajectories of Irish publishing of youth literature. The significance of Irish children’s literature and the importance of a national literature produced by Irish authors for young Irish readers have been increasingly recognised and confirmed over the last four decades, for example by the establishment of the Children’s Literature Association of Ireland in the 1980s and the creation of Laureate na nÓg in 2010. Since the turn of the millennium, the emergence and commercial success of Irish young adult (YA) fiction and its exploration of adolescent turbulence have extended the imaginative territories addressed by Irish youth literature. The momentum of YA fiction has generated valuable opportunities for considering how youth is positioned within Irish society. This chapter considers what these contemporary works tell us about childhood and young adulthood from an Irish perspective.

Given the UK’s increasingly ‘multicultural’ composition, the question of how cultural diversity is represented in literature written for children and young adults has been of enduring social and educational significance. This issue was first highlighted prominently with the publication of the 1985 Swann Report ‘Education for All’, which stressed the need for a curriculum that reflected the diversity of Britain’s population, and has been addressed in public discourse ever since. Creating new versions and offering new visions of society remains a key task in different genres for young readers: narrative, poetry, and picturebook. This chapter focuses on the works of selected writers noted for offering a wide array of cultural perspectives and a long-standing commitment to representing a diverse society. They work with a variety of strategies, ranging from bleakly realistic representations of individuals and communities to the use of speculative fiction pointing towards the narrowness of cultural categories. The black or Asian British child or young adult in these text is firmly placed and made visible in a society that is portrayed as an increasingly diverse cultural contact zone.