Steffen Martus approached the task of writing a “literary history of the present” with curiosity. And so it is that he “surprises himself” when he arrives at the end of Narrated world ends up with Colleen Hoover and other protagonists of the new adult trend. You could have predicted this by looking at the bestseller lists. But the professor of modern German literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin has, of course, even more compelling arguments. Looking back, the development appears to him to be “certainly logical”. And once you have read the almost 600 pages, followed by another 120 pages of sources and keywords, you cannot contradict him.
