I've encountered many variations on the Romeo and Juliet theme. Personally, I think Shakespeare's is the most sublime, but then I've been led into understanding and dug into it and recognized many of the more difficult features to understand and that make it outdated for contemporary expectations. (Probably among the many reasons why Shakespeare's works are more studied than any others.) Shakespeare wrote in an age when censors ruled the press, yet he had a unique royal dispensation, probably due to his extraordinary bardic wit and subtextual perceptions.West Side Story (1957), a stage play, has regularly been contrasted and compared with Romeo and Juliet (circa 1590), yet it too is outdated in contemporary expectations. Maybe it's time for a new updating? The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton (1967) is arguably a new perspective (for its time) on some of the same issues, different in as many ways as it's similar to both stories, yet still reasonably contemporary with present-day issues.
On another tangent, much of this thread has revolved around defining what's literary. What about from the other way round, the writer's? I don't think Hinton set out to write a story that either appealed to popular interests or artistic interests or both, yet she, in a very small subset of writers, accomplished both, effectively and succinctly, and when she was a teenager to boot. Hinton told a fabulous story that she wanted to tell without attempting necessarily either a literary or popular appeal.
Literary? Yes. Popular? Yes. Mainstream? Yes. Commercial? Yes. A love story? Yes, though closer to West Side Story than Romeo and Juliet. A coming of age story? Yes. Panned, banned, and censored? Yes. Accessible? Remarkably so. Speculative? No. Even though The Outsiders doesn't typically appear on Young Adult reading lists, it's a Young Adult novel.
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