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Young Adult Literature

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I think this entire idea that there is something called “young adult literature” is completely bizarre. Teenagers are perfectly equipped to read and enjoy the same books that adults read. When I was 12-18 years of age, I really loved books by Balzac, Elsa Triolet, Maupassant, Hans Fallada, Leon Feuchtwanger, John Galsworthy. (No Spanish authors because, in the Soviet Union, we pretended that the Spanish-speaking world was not in existence.)

I see the creation of this spurious distinction between “adult literature” and “young adult literature” as an attempt to infantilize teenagers emotionally and intellectually.

19 responses to “Young Adult Literature”

  1. Sam W Avatar
    Sam W

    Young adult literature is successful because teenagers want to read it, it sells like crazy. I’m not saying it’s particularly good for them, especially in exclusion of everything else, but no one’s forcing it on them. Teenagers are notoriously lazy and Young Adult Fiction is easy to read. It also appeals because the characters are easy to identify with and it deals with problems from their every day life. Now if only schools and parents would encourage them to read more widely as well to balance it out.

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  2. musteryou Avatar
    musteryou

    Juvenalia

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    1. Lindsay Avatar
      Lindsay

      I thought that word referred to something written by a very young person? Something amusingly precocious, written by a gifted writer before that writer was mature enough to have much of substance to say?

      It might very well appeal to an audience of likewise precocious children/teenagers, though. I just thought it mostly referred to the maturity of the writer, not the reader.

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      1. musteryou Avatar
        musteryou

        True, but weirdly I remember seeing this term on the section of the library that was allocated to me in the old days of my youth. I sometimes also perused the adult section of the small, suburban library I attended. It had some misogynist stuff justifying lobotomies for housewives. I actually remember reading that housewives don’t really need a high level of intellectual capability because their job is just to keep house, so lobotomizing them will not reduce their capacity to do their job.

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      2. Lindsay Avatar
        Lindsay

        Oh, interesting. I guess people do use it to refer to the audience’s age, too, then.

        That book sounds funny in a disturbing way, but also kind of familiar, like a lot of the stuff Betty Friedan quoted in The Feminine Mystique. There’s one book from that time period that I’d like to get a look at sometime, just because the excerpts I’ve read from it are so unbelievably misogynistic that I can hardly imagine what the whole book must be like. That book is Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers; could it have been the book you found?

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      3. musteryou Avatar
        musteryou

        I don’t know what book I found, but this was right wing Rhodesia. I think I sometimes saw flashes of its underbelly, it’s oppressive side, which I wasn’t supposed to see. On the other hand, there is a slim chance that I was reading a critique of these ideas, rather than a book actually presenting them as factual or correct.

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      4. Kellen Avatar
        Kellen

        In libraries and bookstores it is used to refer to books intended FOR young adults not by them.

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  3. el Avatar
    el

    I think that children’s, YA and adult lit can all be from excellent to very bad.
    Judy Blume’s Forever about 1st love and sex didn’t strike me as Good lit, when I read it at high school, but it was entertaining and now, when I learned more about US culture, seems Excellent for US teens because of partly providing sex ed and how a healthy relationship with negotiation and breakup look like. Many college students with drunken hook ups (those teens talk before sex and use condoms) and adults haven’t learned this! I would definitely buy it for my older (10+ years) child. Another book I read at high school, after knowing English well enough, was about a girl with anorexia.

    You said that before there were no teenage years, in which YAs searched for their individuality. If now things changed, a new sort of good literature should be created to describe contemporary issues: finding yourself and creating relationships in a freer world, with more equality between the sexes than before, our new world of information (behavior on-line, sorting out often contradictory info) and many others.

    I am going through her lj now and found this post about the comparison between anime series and Dostoevsky. Look, if it’s for YA or anime, it doesn’t equal shallow:
    http://l-eriksson.livejournal.com/415114.html

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  4. el Avatar
    el

    Also you were an exception to be ready to read John Galsworthy at 12. Most people, including me, weren’t even closely ready. I have read some adult books, but see a big difference between O’Henry’s short stories (or Feuchtwanger’s “The Spanish Ballade”) and “The Forsyte Saga”.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      I need to mention, though, that I wasn’t reading Galsworthy in the original at that time.

      Have you read Aleksandra Brushtein? Is she YA lit? She was hardcore amazing. Her own daughter disowned her, though. 😦

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      1. el Avatar
        el

        // I wasn’t reading Galsworthy in the original at that time.

        Then how?

        //Have you read Aleksandra Brushtein?

        No.

        Many books I’ve read, f.e. “The Three Musketeers”, are now classified in US as YA sometimes.

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        1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
          bloggerclarissa

          We had a Russian edition at home.

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      2. el Avatar
        el

        Ah, I wasn’t talking about language, but about ideas. In this meaning you’ve read it in the original. I wasn’t ready for ideas, not language.

        Nowadays there are abridged editions of classics sometimes for children & younger YA. I don’t see why it’s better than waiting till they’re ready to read the (translated) originals and, meanwhile, letting them read simpler adult lit (Duma, adventures, O’Henry, some love stories) and good YA lit.

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        1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
          bloggerclarissa

          God, I hate Louisa May Alcott.

          But I LOVE Jules Verne.

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      3. n8chz Avatar
        n8chz

        Younger YA?

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  5. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Jules Verne, Louisa May Alcott, Robert L. Stevenson, Emilio Salgari, Edmondo De Amicis are all examples of Young Adult literature going back over a hundred years. I enjoyed their books tremendously but undoubtedly I wouldn’t read them again with the same excitement as an adult.

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  6. Pen Avatar
    Pen

    From a writing standpoint, the young adult novel is generally defined as having a protagonist between about fifteen and nineteen (and sometimes up to twenty-one). Many are coming-of-age novels, and it helps the market to separate these books from books in the children’s category that don’t fit the definition, as well as books in the adult category that don’t fit that definition. Seeing as the entire genre is made up of “It’s not this kind of children’s lit and it’s not this kind of adult lit,” there is often no real difference between young adult lit and either of the other categories.

    So it’s all just a marketing ploy to mess with people’s heads. To emphasize the shakiness of the definitions behind marketing definitions, I’ve seen Ender’s Game in the children’s section, the young adult section, and the adult section. Ray Bradbury’s books are often hidden in all three sections, particularly Fahrenheit 451. Classics are making their way into the young adult market, though sadly unabridged, untranslated versions of The Canterbury Tales are not making it to either market. I’m disappointed that The Lord of the Rings is no longer marketed for children, but I’ve seen it in the children’s and young adult sections at libraries. Strangely enough, I’ve seen the original Sherlock Holmes in the children’s section and the adult section, but not the young adult section.

    Also, children who want to read will find a way to read what they want, no matter what age they are. Unless it’s an unabridged, untranslated copy of The Canterbury Tales. I’m fairly bitter about that–they should at least have carried something of the sort at the bookstore.

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  7. Elizabeth Switaj (@EKSwitaj) Avatar
    Elizabeth Switaj (@EKSwitaj)

    I remember YA Lit being something my classmates and I read in late elementary school and, to a lesser degree, middle school (so 12 was maybe the upper limit for it). Basically, it allowed us to read about the adolescent years we were all nervous about getting into while also believing (because it was *young adult*, not children’s lit, afterall) that we were already there in terms of maturity.

    (But for various reasons, we were probably not a representative sample.)

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  8. Mike Avatar
    Mike

    Some of the best literature in the last decade has been in the YA category, in my opinion, and is much more intellectually sophisticated and just better art than, say, an interminably boring and turgid Jonathan Franzen novel that is celebrated for to-me unknowable reasons.

    YA literature itself has grown more sophisticated, which I think perhaps many of the commenters above don’t realize as they are only familiar with instances of it from the 1970s or 1980s.

    I was an early advanced reader as well. I read Moby Dick and understood it just fine when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade (can’t remember for sure). I was reading National Geographic magazine in the first grade, with perfect understanding.

    I never read YA when I was young. I skipped right from the alphabet to Stephen King (first “adult” books I ever read) and branched out from there.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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