Young Adult Lit is Not a Young Adult

It's the genre we either love or despise. There doesn't seem to be in between. For some reason every-time we are caught reading this genre somewhere in public, there is always someone to point out the mediocrity in your choice of novel. Most of the time that person is yourself. I digress. I have always hated this connotation that this genre gets; people seem to think that this genre is one of the youngest and most contemporary genres on the market. While I will agree that young-adult literature does often-times push the boundaries on what can be put into the book, most of these "tricks," you see authors try to pull is not as new or revolutionary as we all are lead to believe. The history of this genre is a lot farther back than most people give it credit for.

I guess before we can even get to the idea of what the history of this genre of LITERATURE is, we should probably take a quick look at some of the history of literature itself first. Most literary scholars will tell you that there are two main types of literature based on their time, and those are classic literature and contemporary literature.

Classic Literature

While there are all sorts of modern-classics that are young-adult literature that have come out in the past 50 years, young adult literature is generally not considered classic literature by most literary scholars. Classic literature often-times is written before World War 2. Some of the classic literature you might read in high school are books like Lord of the Flies by William Golding and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Often times the main protagonist will be a white christian person (most of the time male but not always) who navigate changes to their typical environment. Often times the issues faced in these novels face issues in environments and settings that couldn't be possible today; they have grown way past their times. When you're reading classic literature, you'll know it. Nobody really talks like that anymore. 

There were also very clear roles based off of the genders. Many times the stories in these novels face questions about what happens when a character navigates away from their gender-norms. Men were deemed to be providers and women were deemed to be caretakers. Since the man was away from the house working or with his friends, often-times male characters would have the most sinful actions while the women sort of acted as a moral compass. This is a trope that is explored today in shows like Family Guy where Peter is absolute idiot all the time and Lois is always there to discourage Peter and his stupid shenanigans. Now picture this, but on steroids.

One sub-genre of classic literature genre that I have listed above is a very popular type of story known as the Bildungsroman. This word is contrived of the two German words -Bildungs(Formation) and Roman (novel), or what we call today a 'coming of age novel.' The Bildungsroman(always capitalized since it's a German noun) is a sub-genre of classic literature dating back to the late 1700's with precursors possibly dating thousands of years ago. These are stories that will follow a protagonist in a situation or state of life that they are exceedingly displeased with. The person will navigate a set of difficult set of circumstances, and often times will end on a good note. Probably the most perfect example of classic literature novel being a Bildungsroman is almost all of the work from 19th century English authors, the Bronte Sisters. I'll be taking a closer look at some of their work below, but for our purposes here you can just agree that all their work would have female protagonists that start in a bad place in their life and navigate dramatic circumstances.

Okay, so classic literature, white people, difficult situations, money, Christianity yada yada. What about the stuff that kids these days (and apparently you for sticking with us so far) actually like to read and don't have to Sparknote?

Contemporary Literature

If you have at-least the very most basic assumption skills, I'm sure that you were able to put together that contemporary literature will be set in areas past world-war 2. Most of the time contemporary literature will maintain a sort of "God is dead" attitude where many of the protagonists are either not Christian or have very complex morals. Harry Potter is about WITCHCRAFT to give you an idea of the "God is Dead" motif present in a lot of contemporary novels. Many scholars will tell you that contemporary literature has to be "unique," but I tell you all to take that with a shaker full of salt. However, the scholars and critics are still kind of right in the sense that there are some novels that do things that nobody had ever done before. A perfect example of this is the book Ender's Game which would start each chapter with no narration and only back and forth exchanges between two characters. Another perfect example of contemporary literature has to be the book The Things They Carried which is literally an anthology of of letters from soldiers who served in Vietnam. These types of things simply didn't happen to this extent in older classic literature books... or did they? We'll get to that in a minute.

Harry Potter is the best-selling contemporary young-adult book franchise of all time. And it is essentially because it follows the Bildungsroman. We have Harry Potter who is an orphaned boy living with Aunts and Uncles who despise him and beat him. He suddenly learns that he is a wizard and then goes and navigates all sorts of crazy obstacles. By the end of the series, Harry has faced his inner-demons and foes and has decided on the type of person he wants to be for the rest of his life. He has found a place in society that he loves, and lives with other people he also loves. Pretty much all of the novels end on a good note even when bad things happened in the end. 

Almost every single novel that we regard as the young-adult literature genre is contemporary literature. One of the main tropes that young-adult literature will have is to either contain, or outright be a piece of diagetic literature. Something that is diagetic is something in the environment that exists in both your world and in the story's world. For instance, diagetic sound might be gunshots in a movie or birds flapping by. A piece of diagetic literature might be a character's confession, diary, or voice recordings. A very common trope. Morally complex characters, no Jesus, actual notes? What kind of blasphemy are these people thinking! They must be really out of their minds to have their types of things going on! Actually, the probably just read some of the Bronte's. 

The Outsider's Brought YAL Inside

This is THE young-adult novel of young-adult novels. S.E. Hinton took a really huge gamble coming out with this novel. First off, she was a teenager in the 1960's who decided to drop out of high school when she wrote this novel. The main thing that makes The Outsiders so unique as a novel is that the novel is written by a young adult, about young adults, for young adults. Not many of the young-adult novels that come out today can really claim this accolade and that's pretty cool. This book is considered a genre-defining novel in the sense that it's by a woman who writes male characters that cuss, drink, smoke cigarettes, and fight. Pretty much all of the angsty and edgy we associate with teenagers today. This was something that most people in the 1960's had never picked up in a book and most definitely would have been considered rebellious and 'sinful' behavior for the time.  The Outsider's is also extremely unique because it revolutionized the way that males were allowed to show affection for each other in novels. People still talk about this novel and teach it in many middle-school classes to this day. Personally, this book was the first book that I've ever read cover to cover in one sitting (up until that point I had never done that) and could not put it down.

When S.E. Hinton released her book, she released it under the name S.E. instead of her real name given to her by her parents. S.E. stands for Susan Eloise. She avoided using this name in order to limit the amount of gender-bias the book would receive. It's true. In the 1960's (and partially now) most women would read books by men, but men would not read books by women. It became a timeless classic almost instantly. It really set the tone for the way that future young-adult literature books would be released.

The entire book itself is a piece of diagetic literature. We seem to have this fixation in our mind that it is one of the most complicated and tide-turning books ever written because it essentially is a nothing than  a confession of a teenage murderer (ouch). We keep telling ourselves over and over again that we haven't seen anything like this ever. We of course all know that this is not true.

Referring back to the Bildungsroman story from earlier, I think you probably already know that this story is most definitely one of them. Think about it. Ponyboy, an orphan boy who lives with his brothers dirt poor in a crime-ridden neighborhood runs away from town after his best friend killed someone. At the end of the novel, Johnny dies and Ponyboy agrees not to fight with his older brother anymore. The novel ends exactly the way that it began with the same phrase. Along his journey, Ponyboy learns so much about life and how to see the world because he experienced it from a very scratched and stained lens.

Now here's the kicker. We all loved it, some of us cried, some of us hated it. We all know it. We've all read it probably more than once in our lifetimes. We've been beat over the head with this fucking book and quite frankly, as much as I love it and as much I will admit that there will always be a special place in my heart for this novel, after reading some 19th century drama novels, S.E. Hinton is nowhere NEAR as original as we give her credit for. 

This is not to throw shade on S.E. Hinton (even though she's irredeemably homophobic) but rather the entire young adult literature genre because the entire trope of those novels having diagetic literature, rebellious and 'sinful' behavior, and morally complex characters is something that has been seen before close to 200 years ago. As I said above, the Bronte sisters really had a lot of the tropes of young adult lit 

The first thing about this awesome novel is not that it has some really long and complex title, but rather because this book was one of the more revolutionary books to come out at the time. Now here is originality and non-standard storytelling in the classic setting at it's best. Based off of what we have talked about for young-adult literature, contemporary is I would argue that this book is really the root of S.E. Hinton's book. There are many similarities with this book. This book I will not spoil because I'm assuming most of you haven't read it.

Coming out in June of 1848, Tenant of Wildfell follows Gilbert Markham who meets a woman named Helen. Helen has a young son and every-time Gilbert asks about the father of the son, Helen refuses to disclose any information about her husband nor her past. What is the secret of this woman's past that she refuses to tell?

The first similarity with The Outsider's with this book is that it was not published with the name Anne Bronte. Fearing the extremely harsh gender-bias brought the Aristocratic Patriarchy of Victorian England, Anne Bronte decided to release this novel not under her real name, but a pen name. She changed her name to Acton Bell. The book was a bestseller, and really gave people a completely different outlook as to how women protagonists could be. As we saw earlier, S.E. Hinton decided to give herself a sort of gender-neutral name by abbreviating her first two names in order to steer off gender-bias.

Like The Outsider's, Tenant's main narrator is a male character written by a woman. In fact, there are more male characters in this book than there are women. Sound familiar? How many female characters were there in The Outsiders? Not many.

Now on to the genre, and the overall history of the genre itself. This book has two main story-lines. The first is the plot that I described earlier with Gilbert and Helen, and the second story-line is Helen's diary starting from before she had her son. This is not just a few lines sprinkled in here and there, the novel is literally 70% of Helen's diary. This book is so diagetic, that it is quite literally a book within a book. While I definitely get that the 19th century had tons and tons of people using diaries to chronicle their lives in a personal and private way, most people didn't just stick an entire diary right in the middle of their book back in Victorian England. Most people didn't just write books that 200 page confessions. See the similarity? Maybe S.E. Hinton deciding to go ahead and write a diagetic piece of literature isn't as innovative as we thought.

Like many of the Bronte novels, Tenant is a huge Bildungsroman. I don't want to spoil the book too much, but I will say that it begins with Helen coming to Wildfell Hall with her son and she is in a bad spot in her life. After reading through her entire diary, she navigates even more obstacles from her previous life. I won't spoil the end, but the novel ends on a pretty positive note. Not only is the Bildungsroman model of storytelling not original to The Outsiders, it's not even original to the Bronte's. This type of story was something that pre-dated even the Victorian England Bronte's life.

Anne Bronte was a huge Christian. Of the 3 sisters, she was seen practicing her Christian faith more than any of her sisters. So one would expect her books to be Christian. Oh how very wrong I was when I made that assumption too. This novel might as have been soaked in a cask of wine before it was written. There are men turning their friends into cuckolds, copious amounts of wine and brandy, and absolute dehumanization of anything with 2 X chromosomes. There's a lot of crazy and sinful stuff going on in these pages. This book came out before most of the American Canon authors were born. There was a lot of Christianity in the world, and people drinking like fishes and gambling away in ever-so-Christian London was not something that the world was really accustomed to. There's a lot of sinful shit in this book! So maybe S.E. Hinton was not as bold and unfounded as she thinks by letting her teenage characters smoke cigarettes and drink whiskey.

Conclusion (TL/Dr)

Young adult literature while definitely popular for the young readers of today is often revered as a new genre, but it's really not. It's essentially just more of the same old character tricks that much older authors used to use. We have seen what happens when Christianity is not the basis for all character actions today, and we saw the same thing back then too. We see diagetic pieces of literature like movie-scripts and voice recordings nowadays, and we also saw character diaries and letters back then too.

Young adult-literature is not anything that we haven't seen before. Instead of trying to get others to picture young-adult literature as fake or false literature, rather picture it as literature with training wheels. To pick up Lord of The Flies nowadays is a really big feat. Readers have lessened and changed over the years so reading books that are very wordy might be really difficult to people who only use the language casually. This genre takes everything that we loved about classic literature and adds a hint of angst to it; it's also presented in such a way that it never really fatigues the reader. There might be some words that are thrown in there that might stump a few people, but it's not anything that will hinder most people's understanding.

So there you go! You made it to the end. I'm glad you stuck with me, and I really hope that if this were to get a grade, it would get an A. Always remember to be safe, make good choices, and remember that your spiritual confidant (or lack thereof) is watching. Is that contemporary enough for you?