Y is for young adult.
I didn't know much about it before I moved to Sweden because I was
mostly interested in fantasy, and at that time fantasy tended to be
for younger children. During my first year in Sweden I took a course
in young adult fiction. The instructor, who later became my
supervisor, had an interesting approach to teaching. She didn't give
us required reading for every session, but a list from which we were
supposed to read as much as possible. Being an obedient student, I
read everything. It was mostly Swedish YA because it was a huge,
internationally acknowledged genre, candid and engaging, with
explicit sex, violence, drugs, teenage parenthood and everything that
children's literature critics today think is new and daring. It
wasn't all good literature, and very few books are still in print or
even mentioned in textbooks, but it was a large area of study in
Sweden in the early 1980s.
After that first course I
went on to my thesis on fantasy, but as soon as I started teaching
myself, YA became one of my subjects because it was a mandatory
course for all secondary teacher trainees. It still had a strong
focus on Swedish literature, but you cannot really talk YA without
first looking at Huckleberry Finn and Little Women, and
of course The Catcher in the Rye is central and has always
been one of my favourite books. And then there was Aidan Chambers
whose novels my students loved, and when he was in Sweden, which he
often was then, I would invite him to give a talk.
In my book From mythic
to linear, YA is defined by linearity, when the cyclical time,
kairos, opens up, and there is no way back. The age of the
protagonist or the reader has nothing to do with it. But, tied to
linearity, YA brings in all the questions that a child was spared or
pretended not to notice: growing up, sexuality, selfhood, parental
revolt, risk taking.
YA today is more
interesting and challenging than thirty years ago: not in themes, but
in expressive means. It has also abandoned the constraints of
everyday realism and branched into many different genres. A wide
field for experimental writing, just as risky as adolescence itself.
1 comment:
When I was a child in Maryland in the 1950s, the children's library was in the basement, with a door around the side, with low ceilings and exposed pipes. I felt insulted going there and my aim was to jump to "adult books" as soon as possible, to get to the "big" library. Maybe if there had been these exciting YA books, I would have paused.
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