Young Adult Realism: Conventions, Narrators, and Readers

Abstract

As a subset of the much larger category of books popular with young adults, young adult (YA) realism is a genre' of literature that has been developing since the mid-sixties and is now recognizable by specific characteristics: adolescent protagonists, narration from the adolescent's point of view, realistic contemporary settings, and subject matter formerly considered taboo. This article has adopted from John Cawelti the concept of the literary formula as the embodiment of "an archetypal story form in terms of specific cultural materials." The cultural materials in YA realism are the materials of youth culture represented, in successful works, as if from the inside, from the point of view of and using the language of adolescents. In addition to having a characteristic narrative method, works of YA realism create for the narratee or implied reader a particular sort of reading role. The method of approaching YA realism as a formula of popular culture has the advantage of taking into account both the literary conventions that constitute the rhetorical strategies of the text and the audience to whom these strategies are directed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.