Young Adult Fiction
Gareth Evans
Hutton Honors College
Young Adult Fiction (YAF) is all the rage these days. While roughly 3,000 Young Adult titles were published in 1997, 10,276 were published in 2012. What’s more, YAF is being bought and read by adults as well as young adults. The term YAF, however, was not invented until the 1960s. That does not mean there was no fiction written for young adults before the 1960s, but it does mean it took the book trade a long time to recognize that young people, teenagers, made up a specific market at which fiction might be aimed. In Young Adult Fiction, we will read books that have either been aimed at young adults from the 1840s until the present, or are currently taught to young adults in the United Kingdom. We will begin with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a novel that was extremely popular with what would now be called young adult women. We will next read two novels—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go—15- and 16-year-olds were or are supposed to read for school in the United Kingdom between the 1970s and the present. We will end the class with four recent examples of YAF: The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling. While most of you are likely to be unfamiliar with Dimaline’s book, a climate change novel of sorts set near the Canadian border, and with Yang’s investigation of anti-Asian-American prejudice, many of you will already have read the books by Collins and Rowling, and that is why you will be teaching those two books in groups toward the end of the semester. Questions we consider will include the following: Do Rowling and Collins feel any different when you’re asked to teach them, because teach them you will, in an academic classroom? What do books written, and sometimes taught, in different periods tell us about what authors and publishers expect teenagers to be capable of reading and enjoying? To what extent do expectations about teenagers and adults change between the 1840s and the present? To what extent do expectations about teenagers and adults change between the 1970s and the present? What, if anything, are readers supposed to learn from reading Young Adult Fiction? Is the increasing popularity and changing nature of Young Adult Fiction positive or is it alarming?
Catalog Information: HON-H 233 GREAT AUTHORS, COMPOSERS, AND ARTISTS