The Many Mutations of YA

After a week off for good behavior, I’m back to my Summer Reading Program Recommendations and Reviews.  

Up next: YA. To those not in the know, YA stands for “Young Adult.” Libraries alternately label such books as “Youth” or “Teen Lit,” and if it seems like these books are hard to peg at distinct age-level, that’s because this section of literature is transitional by nature.  Adolescence is a transitional period in a person’s life, and it affects each individual in a different way. Therefore each individual reader will be mature enough for YA books—and outgrow them—at varying time periods. 
Here are a few criteria for Young Adult Fiction (there’s a whole ‘nother sub-genre of YA nonfiction, but I’m ignoring that):

1. Its target audience is for teens (a broad age of 12-20).
2. It deals with themes that are relevant to this age group.
3. Its content is more mature than Juvenile Fiction, but less mature than Adult Fiction.
4. Convince teens that reading is cool.

As I began to define YA, before I did any research I looked back on my personal experience…and then realized, to my shock and wonder, I didn’t really have any. This doesn’t mean I haven’t read any YA. I’ve read tons. However, the majority of YA books I read were not when I was actually a teen, but since I’ve been an adult. In fact at my childhood library they didn’t even have a YA section until after I had already moved to the Adult Section for my literary needs.

“Is this YA thing a new trend?” I asked myself. 

Time to go beyond my personal experience and use Google. Which gave me lots of ads for the newest YA publications, but no information on the “History of YA.”

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I went on Wikipedia, where all the information is true…actually I went to Wikipedia and used it to find references to actual articles. 

At the outset I guessed that YA was a newer “thing”…say, maybe originating around the 1980’s. But, if you take into account different names that books-marketed-to-teenagers have been called by in the past century, really the origins of YA go all the way back to the early 1900’s. 

This is the “style” of book I like to call DIME NOVELS – Also called “Pulp Fiction” or in the UK “Penny Dreadfuls,” these are the fluffy adventure books targeting teenage boys—teenagers were just starting to be treated like a separate “age group” from children and adults—that were written fast and sold cheaply.  Basically these are the novel form of comic books. Good examples of this type of mass-produced, adventure-central writing are the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Eugene T. Sawyer, and other men using three names or initials. A more modern example would be The Hardy Boys series.

You’ll notice that the target audience was adolescent, but confined to boys. Girls were still stuck jumping ahead to adult novels such as Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte, until Nancy Drew showed up on the scene in 1930. So as early as, say, 1886 (when Eugene T. Sawyer’s first Nick Carter story came out), publishers were targeting young adults. Was it YA?  Not yet. 

HIGH SCHOOL FICTION – According to my skimpy research, real YA began with J.D. Salinger’s 1951 book The Catcher in the Rye, as well as other books that have been standard High School Reading all my life such as The Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird. Starting around the 50’s, Young Adult reading seemed to shift from the pulp adventure genre to serious thematic works such as these.  

Was it YA? According to David Lubar's article The History of Young Adult Novels, yes.  But guess what?  

I disagree with David Lubar, mostly because his article makes want to devise a time machine to go back and stop myself ever from reading a book labeled “YA.” 

I haven’t read The Catcher in the Rye, but I have read the other two examples given above. Yes, they fit Criteria #2 and #3 of my definition of YA fiction. However, I did not get the impression these books were targeted to teens specifically. Honestly I think To Kill a Mockingbird is a book for all ages mature enough to comprehend the themes. The Lord of the Flies—which to be frank I didn’t care for—may have adolescents as the main characters, but it’s more of an allegory of human nature. Besides, Criteria #3, while a mainstay in how many people define YA, cannot be confined to YA. I’ve read picture books with more philosophical depth than some teen lit. 

My main problem with calling High School Fiction “YA,” however, is it lacks Criteria #4: at least in my generation, teens only read these books if they’re assigned them in high school by adults. There is not intrinsic entertainment value in them; it’s a reading assignment—maybe a less arduous reading assignment than Great Expectations*, but a reading assignment nonetheless.

THE MODERN YA -  Let’s talk about Criteria #4. In this excerpt from education.com, you’ll notice the focus on how YA books’ purpose is to encourage a love of reading in teens. This is the age that children who love reading start to drift away in favor of video games, movies, and the mall, all in an effort to be “cool” in the face of peer pressure that often declares bookishness to be “nerdy” and uncool. But YA is the type of book that disproves these scurrilous lies. Look at the Harry Potter series. Look at Twilight…or, uh, not.  Look at The Hunger Games trilogy. Why are we looking at books I’ve never read? Because unlike me, a lot of people like to read what other people have read. When I entered college people widened their eyes in horror when they found out that I hadn’t read Harry Potter. 

“But EVERYONE has read Harry Potter!” they shrieked. 

See how reading can be made cool? That’s how the current series of The Hunger Games and Twilight have been in more recent years. That’s the power of YA.

Don’t get me started, however, on this new monster called New Adult….

*Which a lot of people think is an arduous read, although it’s one of my favorite Dickens novels.