"From Insider to Outsider: The Evolution of Young Adult Literature," Michael Cart

In a similar vein to my last post, this article from Voices from the Middle discusses the changes in adolescent literature over time, but from a much more recent perspective than the Hamilton article.  Michael Cart, himself an award-winning YA author, covers changes from the 1950s to the time of publication (2001).  

Cart begins by relaying some rare statistics of hope about adolescent reading habits: 56% of all students between age 12 and 18 read in excess of 10 books every year, and 70% of middle school students read upwards of 10 books annually.  Cart really has no evidence for why this might be, but says he "likes to think" that middle school students read so much because of "the amazing abundance of good young adult books currently being published for them" (95). 

Cart does refer to some demographic changes in who is considered "adolescent" according to book publishers, making the argument that the range has gradually expanded on both ends, now including "tweens" as well as twenty-somethings.  (Certainly there has been quite a bit of crossover appeal to many recent best-sellers, for example, Harry Potter, Twilight, even The Hunger Games, all of which many parents of adolescents were reading.)

Cart then summarizes each decade's trends in YA lit, starting with the 1940s and 50s, in which "genre fiction" like mystery, adventure, sports, sci fi, and romance was first marketed toward a specific adolescent age group.  The 1960s marked the beginning of that "new realism" I talked about in my previous post, with books like The Outsiders and Robert Lipsyte's The Contender.  These books were not just realistic fiction, but more "hard-edged" (96), as Cart says, focusing on gritty topics relevant to many teen readers, but written in a more artful manner than the more formulaic genre fiction of the previous generation.  In the 1970s, "the decade of the problem novel" (96), this trend became quite pronounced.  Cart explains these "problem novels" as "didactic works of social realism that sacrificed art on the alter of individual 'problems of the week' (alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce, poverty, etc., ad nauseum)" (96).  Because of their [at times unpopular] commitment to discussing gritty social issues, Cart seems to think that genre fiction experienced a resurgence in the 1980s (i.e. Sweet Valley High, Fear Street).  This is an interesting idea that I had never really considered - a kind of retrenchment from social issues in fiction that certainly parallels the move in educational policy away from involvement in or direct amelioration of social problems.

In the 1990s, middle school literature became popular as publishers started to market many YA books to a slightly younger age group, and there was an overall expansion of who was considered a "YA" and just how "Y" they actually were.  Cart says that this "expansion of the audience...freed authors to tackle more serious subjects and to introduce more complex characters and considerations of ambiguity" (96), leading us to what he believes is our current golden age of YA lit.  For the trends of the early-2000s, Cart correctly anticipates the emergence of more graphic media, such as a the graphic novel or other cross-genre hybrid texts (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian or Monster by Walter Dean Meyers).  He also points to the mass popularity of complex works of YA sci fi and fantasy, such as The Golden Compass trilogy.

I agree with Cart that there is a great deal of YA literature to choose from now with deep and juicy themes, rich symbolism, written about issues that adolescents directly care about, and written in a style that is usually more accessible to them.  I think there is an implicit idea in Cart's article that genre fiction is "bad."  I might amplify this a bit by saying that genre fiction may not be what you want to choose for an entire class to read, but I think it is important to understand too that some students just love a certain series, and honestly, reading is reading!  Why split hairs and validate only some "official" books, as we were discussing in class today?  For example, middle school boys often love Mike Lupica's sports books.  They are certainly perfectly fine books, and I would never discourage any student who loved them from reading them.  In fact, I would often direct male reluctant readers towards them.  However, I don't think they are meaty enough to justify reading as a class.  The more I learn about the exponential growth of background knowledge that comes through reading and how it directly correlated with academic success, I think, wow, just get kids to read anything that they enjoy and find any way you can to get them to keep going.  They will transition just fine to more "official" texts later. 

Cart, M.  (2001).  "From insider to outsider: The evolution of young adult literature."  Voices From the Middle; 9 (2), p. 95-97.