YA literature has a fairly recent history compared to literature for adults, and even literature for children. Its development is closely linked to the development of the concept of the teenager in modern Western culture. In the early 1900s, the term “adolescent” became significant for psychologists who examined the transition from childhood to adulthood. This, in combination with students staying longer in school to complete the secondary level of education instead of joining the workforce after primary school, led to the development of the term “teenager”, to denote the group of people who were not children, but not yet adults. The concept was in common use after the Second World War, and books soon began to be marketed specifically towards this age group (Cart, 2010, pp. 3-11).
In the American context, critics disagree regarding when the exact birth of YA literature was: in 1942, with Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer, in 1951, with J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, or in 1967, with S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders.33 In
Norway, YA literature gradually developed into something distinct from children’s literature after the Second World War, and particularly from the 1960s onwards (Birkeland, Risa, & Vold, 2018, pp. 245-246). Regardless of when one wishes to mark the beginning, though, YA literature was well-established by the late 1960s (Trites, 2000, p. 9). In his historical survey of the genre, Michael Cart (2010) argues that YA literature dealt mainly with the perceived interests of middle-class teenagers in the 1940s and 50s: romantic stories for the girls and genre fiction (car books, science fiction, adventure, sports, and animals) for the boys. Gradually, however, YA books – like art, music, and literature in general – began to reflect the changing political, social, and cultural landscape throughout the 1960s and 70s, for instance in the works by authors such as Judy Blume and Robert Cormier. This also meant that YA literature took a “darker” turn (Sambell, 2004). In the 1980s, there was a backlash to romance
33 Note that Salinger’s novel was originally marketed as a novel for adults, but that it has since come to be viewed
and adventure, and the novel series gained a stronghold on the market. In the early 1990s, many publishers and critics predicted the death of the YA novel because of the growth of the middle school novel (aimed at an audience aged 10-14), but it was considered revived and renewed in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Cart, 2010).
The term YA can be difficult to pin down when describing the intended audience of this literature, as different people and institutions refer to different age groups denoted by the term. According to Karen Patrick Knutsen (2017), YA literature “is not a genre designation; instead the label designates a proposed age range for those who might wish to read a particular book” (p. 274). The most common definition of YA is the age group 12-18 (Hill, 2014, p. 3), but some have expanded the YA category to include readers aged 10 to 35 (Cart, 2004). Interestingly, a 2012 study found that 55% of all YA books sold in the USA, Great Britain, and Canada were bought by adults; the largest proportion of these were between the ages 30-44, and in 78% of the cases, they were buying the books for themselves (Publisher's Weekly). This means that YA literature today has a much broader appeal than the age group 12-18, which was the original target audience, and these works are often referred to as “crossover literature” (Knutsen, 2017). To add to the confusion, YA is not the only term used about this type of literature: “adolescent” and “teenager” are also used at times. “Teenager” is fairly simple, as it denotes the ages 13-19, but “adolescent” is more fluid as it was originally a psychological term that denoted the time between childhood and adulthood. It usually referred to the ages 12-19, but this could differ according to whether psychologists, educators, or employers were speaking (Cart, 2010, p. 4). This means that today, the three terms YA, teenager, and adolescent are used to refer to roughly the same age group. In this study, I use the term YA when referring to the literary genre, but the terms teenager and adolescent may be used when referring to characters in the works and/or the readers. When discussing YA literature, the age group 12-18 is seen as the target audience unless otherwise indicated.
Despite its popularity, YA literature has traditionally struggled with attaining critical legitimacy in terms of literary merit and status. For instance, one of the aims of the anthology The Critical Merits of Young Adult Literature: Coming of Age (2014) is to “begin to put to rest doubts about the literary value of YA literature” (Hill, p. 2). Crag
Hill points at the derogatory terms used to denote YA literature, such as “kiddie lit” and “juvenile lit”, and argues that “high school teachers, parents, professors of literature, and even English educators continue to treat YA literature as an illegitimate child” (2014, p. 1). YA literature has sometimes been used as rungs on a ladder to help readers climb towards the literature they really should be reading (Cart, 2010, p. 23), namely serious works written for an adult audience. However, since adults are now also reading YA literature (as the previously mentioned 2012 study referred to in Publisher’s Weekly showed), it is evident that there is more to this literature than just offering a transition for teenagers from childhood, via adolescence, to adulthood. These literary works are primarily aimed at a young adult audience, but they evidently have a more wide-ranging appeal, which says something about these works’ value in themselves. Still, the merits of YA literature are not based on popularity alone. The growing critical attention paid to the genre is another way of acknowledging these works’ worth.
Characteristics
In scholarly works, YA literature is to a large extent still discussed in connection with children’s literature (Hill, 2014, p. 15), although since the mid-1990s, there have been attempts at defining YA literature as something separate from both children’s and adult literature. The traits most commonly agreed upon focus on the protagonist: the text needs to have a teenager as the main character (Backes, 2004; Hunt, 1994), and the story must be told from a teenager’s perspective (Campbell, 2010; Hill, 2014). Roberta Seelinger Trites argued that whereas children’s literature focuses on self-discovery, “YA novels tend to interrogate social constructions, foregrounding the relationship between the society and the individual” (2000, p. 20). One of the reasons for this might be that “society views the teenager in far more negative terms than it does the child”, and the teenager is often in a state of opposition against the adult establishment (Hintz & Ostry, 2003, p. 10). Similarly, Hill argues that YA literature “will also implicitly or explicitly challenge the dominant assumptions contemporary culture conveys to adolescents” (2014, p. 8). However, there are quite a few YA books that appear to be
conformist rather than challenging in their relationship to societal assumptions, for instance novels in the “chick lit” genre that glorify consumerism and emphasize the importance of appearance and heteronormative relationships (Cart, 2010, pp. 93-94). Contemporary YA literature features teenage protagonists who are in a transitional stage between childhood and adulthood, and many of these works address issues related to growing up. The teenage protagonists discover more about the world they live in, and often encounter challenges in relation to these discoveries. Conflicts with adults are frequent, as the adults will often cause problems for the teenagers, for instance by trying to restrict their exploration of their expanding world. Teenage rebellion against parents is a well-known trope, so much so that this is expected in one form or another as young people reach a certain age – in both literary characters and real life.34 From
the 1960s and onwards, YA literature attempted to deal with some of the challenging issues teenagers encountered in their lives. The so-called “problem novel”, which according to Cart “is to young adult literature what soap opera is to legitimate drama” (2010, p. 32), prioritized elaborating on one specific challenge in the plot instead of creating quality characters and stories; these books were very successful in the 1970s. The novels dealt with issues like dropping out of school, runaways, rape, teenage pregnancy and abortion, drugs and alcohol abuse, family problems, and suicide, but were criticized for being too sensational, at times too didactic, and not providing the readers with well-developed literary worlds.
Even though the problem novel is not as widespread as it once was, YA literature still deals with problematic issues that are relevant for teenagers. Violence, bullying, physical and mental abuse, and sexuality can be added to the list of issues mentioned above as topics that are addressed in contemporary YA novels. From time to time, discussions emerge among adults – for the most part parents, commentators, literary critics, and authors – regarding whether it is good for teenagers to read books that deal with challenging issues. For instance, the children’s book reviewer for The Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon (2011), attacked what she believed to be too much
34 Interestingly, though, recent research indicates that contemporary teenagers – in Norway – experience less
conflict in their relationship with their parents, and that they spend more time at home than they used to (A. Bakken, 2016). This might affect this trope in YA literature in years to come.
“darkness” in literature for teens. Her main arguments were that some popular literary works for YA, including Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), are so excessively bleak and violent that they do not depict a realistic image of the world at large, and that too early exposure to these books could be damaging for teens. The books’ “depravity”, “brutality”, and “ugliness” could harm young people’s “happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart” (Gurdon, 2011). In a text entitled “Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in blood” (2011), Alexie responded by stating that these bleak books reflect the reality that many teenagers experience – and as long as there are teenagers who experience the things he writes about, he will continue to write about them. This discussion has also emerged in Norway (see e.g. Aalstad, 2014; Djuve, 2013; Mørk, 2012), which is interesting, considering that Scandinavian literature for children and young adults is known for its darkness and lack of taboos (see discussion in Røssland, 2015). The main conflict in these debates appears to be how much information and insight adults think teenagers should have about their society. This conflict is also of importance in YA works, along with the question of whether teenagers should have any real agency of their own besides that which is decided by adults. These issues are central in YA dystopian fiction, and are discussed further in section 4.2.