Agents, publishers, editors, and authors all screech with extreme frustration “YA is a readership not a genre.” And they’re definitely correct. But that doesn’t mean they’re completely correct.
While the category of ‘Young Adult’ was coined as far back as the early nineteenth century, the reality is that young adulthood (or adolescence) didn’t really begin to exist as either an accepted reality or a cultural phenomenon until the 1950s and 60s. Don’t get me wrong, it existed at a physiological and social level, but being a teenager in say, the 1930s, wasn’t accompanied by the understanding of behavioural development with which we now view these pimply, hormonal years. As such, the transformation of the self from child with limited self-perspective to adult, with autonomy, responsibility, and a (mostly) clear understanding of who you are as a person, wasn’t given much precedence in literature or thought. One more or less went from being a child to an adult, and that was reflected in the fact that the books for children existed, such as Beatrix Potter and A.A Milne, and then there were books for adults like The Great Gatsby or The Age of Innocence, or really, whatever books catered to popular taste at the time.
Reflecting this new understanding of adolescence being a specific and distinct time in people’s lives – and the distinct parameters of the demographic which they comprised – the 1970s and 80s saw the emergence of books for adolescents, specifically catering to them as a readership. The staple feature of these books is that they feature protagonists aged between 12 and 18. Then, in the late 1990s, the Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published, the watershed moment which is widely considered to be responsible for the significant cultural tour de force that is YA books today.
It is undeniably correct to say that the label YA specifically relates to books which are written for and marketed to a certain demographic. And it’s true that within the YA label there are very clear differences in genre. The Percy Jackson and Artemis Fowl series are fantasy, The Hunger Games trilogy is dystopian, and The Hate U Give is (more or less) literary fiction. However. There are sufficient similarities across these books that means they arguably do fall under the broad umbrella the same genre, too.
So let’s start with the basis. What in fact is a genre?
Funnily enough, it’s actually quite difficult to pin down what exactly defines a genre. Wikipedia ironically offered the most cogent answer, claiming “genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or even…length.” Pretty vague, right? A great example of where the lines between genres can become blurred is speculative fiction and science fiction. Both are very similar in that they deal with imaginative concepts typically to do with advanced science and technology, often even overlapping in setting or premise. But speculative fiction looks more specifically at what is possible rather than taking a concept and running with it. However, books across the two genres are often conflated.
The following chart gives a brief overview of how some genres can be broken down:
But it doesn’t even take into account the genre of straight up literary fiction as a genre.
Then you can go down the rabbit hole of sub-genres, which can get really specific (my favourites are often found within the ‘romance’ genre when you find sub-categories like ‘rural’ or ‘bikers’). To that end then, genre can be understood as books which share a similar concept of setting. Moreover, they often have similar storylines, have a particular focus on similar themes. In certain instances, they may share certain writing styles, but this last criterion isn’t necessarily a given.
So with this definition in mind, can we actually consider YA a genre as well as a demographic?
Well, I’d argue yes, in the loosest definition. This is necessarily because the central characters within YA books are of a particular age range.
While the ‘main’ plot of a book obviously is unique to each book, there are broad similarities across what I like to call the ‘B’ story of a book; the personal journey or struggle which a characters undergoes (like coming to terms with their sexuality) while resolving the other, ‘bigger’ concerns of the plot (for example, finding the lost sceptre of Queen Benafix to restore light to the realm of Myfern).
Moreover, the personal journeys and challenges which adolescents face are quite specific: the emotional and physiological changes that puberty wracks upon an individual, falling in love – proper love – for the first time, the question of who you are and want to be as your burgeoning autonomy means you have to develop your own moral identity, or face and resolve hardship and challenge on your own. I’ll call this theme ‘questions of personhood’.
Those are some reasonably specific thematic focuses which arise consistently across most YA books. Take The Fault in Our Stars by John Green and Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo. They obviously fall into different genres, but there are nevertheless similar thematic explorations in both texts. In Shadow and Bone, Alina experiences for the first time the prospect that she can be attractive and desirable. Similarly, Hazel undergoes the experience of being found attractive and desirable for the first time when she meets Augustus. Equally, both characters come of age in terms of the decisions that they make about the course in which their life travels. Alina decides to not allow herself to be a puppet and to actively fight for a better version of the world (sort of), and Hazel comes to understand that it is inevitable people will hurt you, but we can choose who hurts us.
Obviously, beyond that the two books have different thematic focuses and concerns, but the fact remains that there are similarities, and if I continued, I would be able to draw more parallels across the questions of personhood raised within the storyline.
Don’t get me wrong, books for other readerships also force their characters to undergo trials or questions of personhood, but when the protagonist is someone in their twenties or thirties, those questions are generally quite different. For example, these trials often are the challenging of previously held assumptions or the re-evaluation of decisions made in the past and behaviours or ways or being that have become practised as a result. The newness of these questions then, doesn’t exist in books for older readers with older characters.
So if you pick up any two YA books, no matter how different, you’ll likely find that the personal struggle the characters undergo through the development of the story has a parallel to that of a YA book that would otherwise fall into a completely different categorisation. By that definition, there is a broad umbrella that groups Young Adult books into a genre.
One Comment