This dissertation examines the shifting nature of postmodern aesthetics and how globalism has refigured genre boundaries in literatures of the world. My project, which examines adolescent literature post-World War II, along with economic and cultural theory from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, argues that both youth literature and traditional adult literature position the subject, regardless of age and outside identity politics, as an active agent in global capitalism contributing to the production and consumption of commodities. This subject position, which styles children, adolescents, and adults as producers and consumers, indicates that texts categorized as examples of “adolescent literature” overlap and intersect with a more traditional category of adult texts in the postmodern era, linking human experience through this rhetoric of capital.