Young adult literature

‘Young adult’ literature has been a substantial subgenre of children’s literature in the United States and Britain from the mid-twentieth century onwards, and it is increasingly perceived as a key genre - in publishing and marketing terms - in its own right. In the UK, most bookshops and libraries now have a separate, designated ‘Young Adult’ section, markedly set apart from the larger children’s literature section. Young adult (YA) literature, is a topic of current debate across social media, blogs and forums, print media, publishers and booksellers’ magazines, and in academia. This is largely due to the substantial crossover potential of major bestsellers in this field, many of which have also been adapted as films, such as Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy (2008-10), John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012), and Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight saga (2005-9). While recognizing that ‘young adult’ is an ambiguous category and that it is hard to make definitive statements about a rapidly evolving field, this short article provides an introduction to this genre and to some of the issues around its content, values and aesthetic merit. For university teachers frequently involved in teaching students who are on the border between ‘young adult’ and ‘adult’, I would suggest, YA literature can be a valuable tool in the classroom, inspiring debate and engagement and raising questions about the predominance of particular themes in British and American popular literature.

Young adult literature can be most straightforwardly defined as books that are published for readers age twelve to eighteen, have a young adult protagonist, are told from a young adult perspective, and feature coming-of-age or other issues and concerns of interest to young adults.

This definition, from a recent study by Michael Cart and Christine A. Jenkins, references form (first-person narration), as well as content (‘issues and concerns of interest to young adults’). While it does not specify what readers might expect these issues and concerns to be, most purchasers of a novel marked as young adult would assume that it would deal more graphically with themes of sex, violence and dysfunction within families or societies than an equivalent ‘children’s’ book, and that it would not necessarily contain the neat resolution or reassuring ending characteristic of most works written for child readers. ‘Young adult’ as a phrase has been used since the early twentieth century, though in terms of literature, for much of the twentieth century it had greater currency in North America than Britain. Its general adoption in British contexts is more recent, dating roughly to the 1990s onward. Most studies of young adult fiction date the emergence of the genre to one of three American novels: Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer (1942), J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), or, with the greatest frequency, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967). Daly’s novel is relatively little-known in the UK, and Salinger’s novel, while undoubtedly of enormous significance to young adult readers in the West in the twentieth century and beyond, was not specifically designed or published as ‘young adult’ fiction. Hinton’s The Outsiders, on the other hand, famously written while the author herself was still a teenager, was explicitly written to give teenage readers a depiction of the harsh reality of life in a deprived urban environment.

What was and remains distinctive about The Outsiders is the strength of the first-person narration, and particularly the narrator Ponyboy Curtis’s apparent acceptance that the world of gang violence, discrimination and poverty in which he lives is inescapable:

It ain’t fair!”, I cried passionately. “It ain’t fair that we have all the rough breaks!” I didn’t know exactly what I meant, but I was thinking about Johnny’s father being a drunk and his mother a selfish slob, and Two-Bit’s mother being a barmaid to support him and his kid sister after their father ran out on them, and Dally -wild, cunning, Dally - turning into a hoodlum because he’d die if he didn’t.

As this quotation highlights, these characters operate without the support of stable family structures or of the state, and in precarious economic circumstances. Ponyboy’s spoken language (‘ain’t’ rather than ‘isn’t’) immediately marks him as of lower social status then the likely readers of the novel. The only option for him and his peers, Hinton suggests, is to turn to criminality and violence as a form of self-defence. In the course of the novel, Ponyboy is implicated in murder when his friend Johnny stabs a rival gang member who has violently attacked them, and he later sees Johnny and one of his older mentors, Dally, die. While the plotline is thus in many ways irredeemably grim, Hinton offers a trace of optimism in Ponyboy’s mature realization, in the close, of the wider implications of his situation and the need for change:

I could see boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn’t believe you if you did. It was too vast a problem to be just a personal thing... Someone should tell their side of the story, and maybe people would understand then, (p.155)

The novel The Outsiders is thus framed as Ponyboy’s attempt to tell this side of the story, to speak from the perspective of an outsider to readers unfamiliar with the world in which he lives and inclined to judge him and his peers as ‘hoodlums’. This, of course, links the novel to the bildungsroman or indeed kunstlerroman tradition, as it becomes the story of how the hero became a writer: both these genres are important in the development of young adult fiction and link it to earlier forebears, such as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre or Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.

Hinton’s novel is, after sixty years, significantly dated (perhaps most specifically by the absence of race as a category: all her characters are white), but it was crucial in setting up the parameters of a genre. Using The Outsiders as a prototype, we might narrow Cart and Jenkins’s definition, and argue that the archetypal YA novel features:

• •    A first-person narrator, speaking directly to the reader in colloquial and often non-standard English.

• •    He or she is likely to experience a strong sense of alienation from his or her family and wider society.

• •    He or she is often already an outsider to this society (generally presumed to be white, privileged, Western society) due to socioeconomic or class status, nationality, race, gender, religion or sexuality.

• •    He or she is likely to lack strong adult role models, and often comes from a home where at least one parent is dead or missing or from a family haunted by past trauma: for protagonists of YA fiction, peers are usually more significant than family members, and where they do have a stable family background, their parents will be depicted as incapable of understanding their child’s actions or feelings.

• •    He or she will often engage in morally ambiguous, unconventional, risky or illegal forms of behaviour (violence, theft, deceit, drug-taking, various forms of

sexual activity), and may be forcibly subjected to violence, including sexual violence.

• •    He or she will come into direct conflict with society (police, social workers, medical workers, school) within the plot. Social structures and those who enforce them (e.g. teachers, all forms of bureaucrat) are likely to be represented as flawed, corrupt and unjust, with rare exceptions.

• •    In the course of the novel the narrator will achieve a level of maturity and be able to reflect upon his or her experiences, but it is unlikely that the novel will have a conventional happy ending. In most examples, the protagonist will remain trapped within - or fighting against - a society that the novel has shown to be deeply flawed.

This list enables us to perceive that it is not simply the age of protagonists or readers, or general bildungsroman themes, that are important in defining a work as ‘young adult’. It is also the fact that these novels typically engage with the relationship between the individual and wider society. As Roberta Seelinger Trites argues in Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, protagonists of YA literature inevitably must ‘learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within which they must function’. Her study suggests, indeed, that ‘The chief characteristic that distinguishes adolescent literature from children’s literature is the issue of how social power is deployed during the course of the narrative.’

While I agree with this assessment in many respects, it is worth noting that Trites’s argument is more difficult to justify in relation to two of the recent major American authors in the field of young adult fiction, Meyers and Green. Both authors have very substantial fan cohorts among teenage readers and are regarded as celebrities in themselves, with Green in particular making striking use of social media to disseminate his views, educate and interact with young adult readers. Both have seen their novels adapted as successful films, and both have large adult as well as young adult readerships. But do The Fault in

Our Stars and Twilight fit with the model set out by Hinton and others, or not? They certainly fit the broader definition supplied by Cart and Jenkins, in that they are first-person narratives spoken by and for young adults. Arguably, Meyers’ Bella concludes the series by learning ‘to negotiate the levels of power’ within the existing hierarchies of the vampire world, and the Twilight saga does potentially question the effectiveness and justice of social structures both in this fantasy world and the human world. Yet the ultimate conservatism and triumphalism of Meyers’ series and the conventionality of its happy-ever-after heterosexual romance is a marked divergence from the attitudes of American YA fiction in the ‘golden age’ of the 1960s and 1970s, which is more notable for repeated refusals of this narrative arc.

Green’s The Fault in Our Stars similarly centres on a romance plot, in this case between two teenagers suffering from incurable cancer. It does conform to the list above in that many YA novels feature protagonists whose alienation is linked to physical difference - illness or disability - which gives them a more cynical outlook on the world. The novel is unflinching in its depiction of the physical realities of sickness and ends with the painful death of the hero, Augustus, leaving the narrator grieving and still dealing with her own probable terminal illness. But society in this novel is supportive, if not always fully understanding - the health care system is good and its professionals can be trusted, parents are kind and loving, and while the protagonists’ sexual encounter is arguably a minor rebellion against the societal norms expected of ill or disabled characters, it takes place in the context of a loving and committed relationship. As in Twilight, the novel is dominated by the female protagonist’s thoughts and feelings about this relationship. While both novels, in their depiction of teenage romances that have a Romeo and Juliet aspect (Green’s title refers to Shakespeare’s play, which is also heavily referenced within Meyers’ series), do have potential to connect the personal with the political, neither chooses to do so.

These examples show the difficulty of producing a one-size-fits-all model of YA literature, especially in a moment when the genre is expanding so rapidly. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that many of the most exciting, long-lived, and controversial works of YA literature, from both sides of the Atlantic, have tended to be darker and more conflicted texts. In Britain, just as Hinton and other American writers such as Robert Cormier, Paul Zindel, Judy Blume and Lois Duncan investigated the troubled relationships between young adults and society, writers of children’s literature similarly began to explore the lives of teenagers who viewed themselves as outsiders. British YA fiction from the 1960s to the 1980s is especially noticeable for its emphasis on social realism, on gritty representations of working-class childhood and young adulthood. Sylvia Sherry’s Л Pair of Jesus Boots (1969), for example, follows its protagonist Rocky O’Rourke as he negotiates life in the slums of post-war Liverpool, while Joan Lingard’s The Twelfth Day of July (1970) and its sequels follow a couple, Kevin and Sadie, who fall in love across the Catholic-Protestant divide in Belfast during the Northern Irish Troubles. Both these novels plus Barry Hines’s Л Kestrel for a Knave (1968) and Jan Needle’s My Mate Shofiq (1978) feature leading characters who are or become deeply disillusioned with their families, communities and the social and governmental structures of England, and who seek - vainly, in some cases - a better future for themselves. All these novels also use their characters to offer wider commentaries on problems in contemporary British politics and society, such as racial and class discrimination, immigration and unemployment.

These instances, however, are not entirely comfortably placed within the YA tradition, primarily because they do not use first-person narration, and because the expected readership for Sherry and Lingard is at the younger end of the YA spectrum, around 12-14. (All these works are still recommended novels in the British school curriculum for students of this age). The Twelfth Day of July, for example, describes its protagonists as ‘children’ throughout, is written in relatively simple English, and was marketed in the Puffin range of children’s books. Yet the back cover of the original Puffin edition noted ‘For readers of 12 or more’, indicating the novel’s ambiguous status. Л Kestrel for a Knave, in contrast, was and is marketed as an ‘adult’ book in the Penguin series.

Key British works of children’s literature from the 1980s, many of which are still more explicitly political in their strong opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and its policies, are equally ambiguously placed between the categories of ‘children’ and ‘young adult’ or ‘teen’. Janni Howker’s The Nature of the Beast (1985), an outstanding first-person narrative from a teenage working-class protagonist, Bill Coward, suffering the effects of unemployment and economic depression in a small Yorkshire town, won the Whitbread Children’s Novel Award but also the Observer Teenage Fiction Prize. This novel meets all my stated criteria for YA fiction: Bill speaks in Northern English dialect, was abandoned by his mother as a baby and acts as carer to his father and grandfather, and is in part an outsider even in the working-class community he inhabits. The dark plot, which slides almost into fantasy in Bill’s hunt for a quasi-mythical, quasi-real beast that is terrorizing his locality, ends unhappily and inconclusively with Bill’s violent reaction to overhearing a social worker threaten to remove him forcibly from his home and place him ‘in care’ (i.e. in a state-run institution). Yet this novel was (and is) considered part of the children’s literature tradition.

Aidan Chambers’ 1982 Dance on My Grave, in contrast, while far less overtly politicized, was marked as ‘not suitable for younger readers’, probably because, unlike Lingard, Howker and Hines, Chambers openly discusses sexual desire and a sexual relationship, in this case between two teenage boys. Chambers’ novel is marked by tragedy - Barry, one of the boys, has died (or committed suicide) in a motorcycle accident - and the plot shows the narrator, Hal, gradually recovering from with his guilt and grief over this death. Chambers’ novel is part of a British and transatlantic tradition of teenage fiction in which the protagonist comes to terms with his or her sexuality, happily or unhappily, in the course of the narrative. This also includes the large subset of novels about teenage pregnancy, such as Berlie Doherty, Dear Nobody (1991), Rumer Godden, The Peacock Spring, an early example from 1975 which deals with an interracial relationship in India, rebranded under a teen fiction imprint in the 1980s, or Liz Berry, Easy Connections (1983), which controversially tackles the subject of rape and pregnancy.

Chambers’ Dance on My Grave is also exemplary of developments in young adult fiction from the 1980s onwards because of the playful experimentation of the narrative and its use of contrasting first-person perspectives to give us an alternative take on the protagonist’s reading of events. Hal, who like his predecessor Ponyboy Curtis is an aspiring writer torn between completing his education and leaving school in order to find paid employment, speaks in a self-conscious, mockpedantic manner and in fragmented, short sections:

4/If you only want the what-happens-next Bits of this tale, please skip from here to Bit 5. If you want to know what I was so keen to think about out there on the briny, apart from the question of my fascination with Death, read on.

Hal’s deliberate facetiousness and devotion to English slang terms (‘out there on the briny’ rather than ‘on the sea’) can also be read as his experimentation with camp, with sounding queer to the reader, comparable to the Cockney rhyming slang that the characters deploy to discuss sex:

“Like a plate of ham?”, Barry said one night.

“Thought you was ten-to-two, squire.”

“Don’t mess about.” (p.151)

In the 1990s and beyond, the strand of social realist British fiction for teenagers continued, most notably in Melvin Burgess’s very well-known Junk (1996). In this novel, the central protagonists, Gemma and Tar, run away from home as teenagers and become heroin addicts in 1980s Bristol; their descent into addiction and gradual acceptance of a world of casual criminality, brutal death and in Gemma’s case, sexual exploitation, is depicted with striking realism. At the end of the novel, while Gemma is a recovering and mature single parent, Tar, the most sympathetic character, seems to be trapped in an inescapable cycle of addiction. What most students note about Junk is its array of narrative perspectives, different voices that serve to show us the self-deception that infects both Gemma and Tar’s own version of their descent into addiction. Junk is YA literature par excellence. But in contrast to some of the examples discussed above, it is also a profoundly didactic novel about the dangers of drug culture. Young adult fiction, because of its focus on ambiguity and tendency to reject or question societal views of right and wrong, is usually less overtly didactic than children’s literature. In as much as the British novels mentioned above contain a moral message, it is usually that contemporary society and politics are deeply flawed and that it is the role of the young to unmask false ideologies and effect positive change. Junk, in contrast, neatly tricks the reader: it initially presents drug culture, through Gemma and Tar’s eyes, as exciting and part of a rebellion against oppressive adult society, but the plot ultimately works to show that this is a delusion and that safety and security lie in the bourgeois lifestyle that the teenagers initially reject.

Burgess’s key novels of the 1990s and early 2000s were frequently greeted with shock and outrage for their depictions of casual sex, drug and alcohol culture, yet if they are more explicit than predecessors from the 1960s-1990s, they are also more conservative, in placing the onus on individual choice - Gemma has no serious reason for running away from home, though Tar does - and on the harsh consequences that can result from reckless decisions.

As has been frequently noted by literary critics, the 1990s and 2000s also witnessed a dramatic resurgence of fantasy for young adult readers, spurred in part by the Harry Potter phenomenon. While fantasy always ran in a parallel strand to the realist works described above, with important contributions to mid-late twentieth-century children’s and YA fantasy by British writers such as Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper, and to science fiction and dystopia by John Christopher, Robert Westall and others, it is only at the turn of the twentieth century that YA fantasy developed as a major crossover genre with adult fantasy. YA fantasy, while it embraces a huge number of divergent works, is particularly distinguished by dystopian works in which YA heroes and heroines are frequently at the mercy of powerful state or government forces that they cannot defeat or comprehend. They may escape from or bring down oppressive regimes, but this does not necessarily lead to a happy ending: either the disillusioned protagonist comes to believe that all regimes are corrupt, or he or she has suffered and lost so much in the effort that a genuinely happy ending seems out of reach. The best-known recent example is, of course, Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, a series which draws heavily on established traditions in the genre.

As Kay Sambell observes, dystopia is important in children’s literature because it signals:

a perceived crisis in the nature of childhood, or, more accurately, in the confidence that adults still know best how to ethically inform and guide children's future lives. [...] In most children's science fiction to date this sense of perceived crisis surrounding the adult world has been rendered in extraordinarily negative terms, often with child characters pitted against a powerful adult regime.

Sambell argues that dystopia for children, nonetheless, varies from adult dystopia because it tends to embrace endings where there is at least some hope of a new and better world -unlike, for instance, the conclusion to George Orwell’s 1984 or similar adult dystopias. This is not, however, generically true of YA fiction. In Britain, stand-out dystopian works in this genre which deliberately present painfully bleak endings include Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses (2001) and its sequels, and Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy, starting with The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008). Blackman’s sequence is significant because it directly takes on racism, presenting us with a dystopian society modeled on the segregation-era Southern United States yet with a key difference; black people hold the power in society, and white people are routinely discriminated against. The protagonists, Sephy and Callum, are childhood friends and eventually lovers who must negotiate their relationship across the colour divide and in the face of familial and societal opposition. The novel also takes on the key contemporary theme, very visible in 21^st century dystopia, of terrorism and its causes, as Callum becomes drawn into a militant group. Blackman’s novel, which she wrote in response to the Stephen Lawrence case in Britain (the notorious murder of a black teenager in 1993, which led to the London police force being condemned for institutionalized racism), is an angry inditement of society for its prejudices.

Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go, like Noughts and Crosses and many YA novels from the 1960s to the present, is deeply concerned with the intersection between masculinity and violence, with a plot centring on the hero’s refusal to commit an act of murder and thus become an adult man according to the norms of his society. It also contrasts the hero with a less conflicted, active and intelligent female protagonist who is a leading protagonist as well as a romantic interest, in a move typical of recent YA fantasy. Ness, like Philip Pullman in the His Dark Materials trilogy, is concerned with religious fundamentalism and fanaticism (and the misogynistic and racist attitudes that he suggests these foster), setting his story in a dystopian all-male theocracy with resonances of Puritan America in the seventeenth century. His greatest innovation lies in the use of font and typeface to represent the fact that men in his imagined society can hear each other’s thoughts, and in the striking, ungrammatical and colloquial voice of his near-ill iterate hero.

Ness and Blackman’s novels were my choices to discuss in the Perm seminar in September 2014 because they so clearly represent the ways in which YA dystopian fiction investigates and condemns attitudes in Britain and the US towards race, gender or religion. Yet with the rapid growth in the YA publishing market, it could be argued that dystopian fiction is already no longer the next big thing. A recent article from the publishers’ trade magazine Publishers Weekly, for example, starts by asking ‘Is realistic young adult fiction poised to overturn years of dystopian rule?’, perceiving a recent trend towards more realist fiction, as indicated by the rise of Green and his imitators. It is possible that this decade will see a turn away from the openly politicized, violent dystopias of the early 21^st century, towards a renewed focus on interpersonal relationships and romance plots.

The current popularity of YA fiction in the crossover market has led to passionate debate from its fans and its detractors. A piece by Ruth Graham for the online magazine Slate in summer 2014, for instance, in which she argues that ‘the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction’ and that adults should be embarrassed to read it, has attracted over 3000 comments and in excess of 32,000 mentions on Facebook and other social media. As this brief survey makes evident, I disagree with Graham? whose claims only hold true for a sample of recent novels (her primary target is The Fault in Our Stars) which are not, as I suggest aboves necessarily representative of the tradition. Young adult literature rarely seeks to compete with ‘literary’ adult fiction: it is genre fiction, and can more profitably be compared to detective fiction, adult fantasy and romance. In this context, however, many works of YA literature are substantially better written, more complex and more morally ambiguous than comparable ■adult’ bestsellers. These are not works written as ‘literary’ fiction, though some (Howker, Chambers, Ness in particular) would richly repay a closer literary analysis than they have yet received.

As university teachers, often attempting to engage students who fall into the ‘young adult’ age range, this literature can be an extremely valuable tool in the classroom in inspiring debate and helping students to unpick the ideologies and aims behind literary works that are, above all, pleasurable and exciting to read. As these texts are deliberately written to be accessible, and in many cases intended to attract young adults who are not regular readers of literature, they could be particularly helpful introductions to issues in twentieth-century British literature and culture for students studying English as a second language. The global success of YA literature raises questions about what young adult and adult readers want to read and why, and invites students to consider how marketing, branding, publishing and adaptation can create and shape the expectations of a designated ‘young adult’ audience, in other words, how genres come into being.

Further Reading

This list represents a sampling of key works from the British tradition, though it is by no means comprehensive. For information on recent highly-regarded works of YA fiction, see the information about the new Young Adult fiction prize:

Blackman, Malorie. Noughts and Crosses (2001)

Burgess, Melvin. Junk (1998)

Chambers, Aidan. Dance on My Grave (1982)

Doherty, Berlie. Dear Nobody ( 1991)

Hines, Barry. Л Kestrel for a Knave (1968)

Howker, Janni. The Nature of the Beast (1985)

Lingard, Joan. The Twelfth Day of July (1970)

Needle, Jan. My Mate Shofiq (1979)

Sherry, Sylvia. Л Pair of Jesus Boots (1969)

Ness, Patrick. The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008)

For resources on American YA fiction, Prof Anne Jamison of the University of Utah has made the resources from her ‘YA lit’ class (spring 2014), covering twentieth and twenty-first century adolescent fiction from the United States, open access: