While the young adult novel as a distinct genre is generally seenas emerging after the publication of J. D. Salinger's Catcher in theRye in 1951, fiction about and for adolescents has a long literary tradition reaching back to the previous century. This panel seeks to examine late 19th and early 20th century predecessors of the contemporary young adult novel with the aim of exploring and expanding what constitutes this category and challenging some of the social and cultural assumptions that inform our views of adolescence, the assumption, for instance, according to Michael Cart, that adolescence did not exist before the 1930s: "the very idea of young adulthood as a separate and distinct part of life's progress from cradle to grave became a part of the public consciousness . . . not . . . until well into the Great Depression of the 1930s" ["YA Literature" in Bernice E. Cullinan, et al, eds. Continuum Encyclopedia of Young Adult Literature (2006)]

The panel seeks proposals on fiction written for and/or about girls and young women between the ages of approximately 15 and 22, published between approximately 1880 and 1930. This 50 year period, spanning the turn of one century into another, saw significant changes in the social attitudes toward the female sex. Does the emergence of the New Woman in the 1890s and other emerging social changes of the time find its way into the fiction involving female adolescence as it does into mainstream literature? Does the literature of female adolescence evince subversions of the status quo? If it toes the line of 19th-century social norms for females, does it begin to fall behind the times? Where do these works fit in with the literary movements of their time, with realism, naturalism and literary modernism? The panel is open to works from America, Britain, Australia, Canada, and transnational approaches are also welcome. Please send 1-2 page proposals and a brief biography by October 7th to Rita Bode: rbode@trentu.ca.