Who are the ‘Young Adults’ in Young Adult Fiction?

Most categories of fiction are described by the content of their stories. Crime novels have a crime. Historical novels have an historical setting. Horror novels are scary. It’s pretty straightforward most of the time.

But this isn’t true of Young Adult Fiction for reasons I explain here.

One of these reasons is that the primary defining feature of YA is its readership not its content. And working out exactly who the readership is a topic of debate.

And it isn’t a new debate either. In 1994, writer and academic, Dr Nadia Wheatley questioned the terms ‘teenager’, ‘adolescent’ and ‘young adult’, where the boundaries for these categories began and ended, and what encompassed each. She summed up her point by asking, ‘Could any of us say with absolute certainty who and what these people are?’ (Wheatley 1994: 1).

It’s a good question. I’ve read a lot about it and I’m not sure I could do it.

Calm down, nerds – it’s not that hard

You might say this problem is an example of over-thinking by nerdy readers like me and a young adult relates to a specific age group that isn’t actually hard to define. But the debate extends beyond literary studies.

Professor Susan Sawyer, Chair of Adolescent Health at the University of Melbourne, states in her 2018 paper, Age of Adolescence, the ‘phase of life stretching between childhood and adulthood, and its definition has long posed a conundrum’. Sawyer argues that social and biological changes over the last century mean that a definition of ‘10–24 years corresponds more closely to adolescent growth and popular understandings of this life phase’ rather than the ages between 10 and 19 years (Sawyer 2018).

This rings true when I compare what the average 24 year-old is doing nowadays compared to what my grandparents were doing at that age. Or even someone less ancient like me.

It also corresponds to literary academics Maureen Nimon and John E. Foster’s assertion that while the beginning of puberty indicates change is occurring for a young person, it’s society that dictates ‘the intellectual, social, psychological and personal expectations’ projected on to them (Nimon and Foster 1997: 25).

Which came first: the chicken or the young adult?

Professor Perry Nodelman argues the readership is arguably as much a product of the category, as the category is a product of a group of readers. He says:

…the ‘young adults’ in the phrase ‘literature for young adults’ are most usefully seen as the adolescent readers that writers, responding to the assumptions of adult purchasers, imagine and imply in their works (2008: 5).

Another writer and academic, Jacqueline Rose, said a similar thing about children’s literature thirty years ago, when she stated:

…there is no child behind the category ‘children’s fiction’, other than the one which the category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there for its own purposes (1984: 10).

Consider that a moment. There is no young adult in Young Adult Fiction.

Is the whole category based on assumptions writers make about who they imagine is reading their stories? I think there’s a bit of evidence to suggest the question is valid.

…there is no child behind the category ‘children’s fiction’, other than the one which the category itself sets in place…

Jacqueline Rose, Writer and Academic

Professor Sandra L. Beckett (2009) argues that many authors consider the narrow age categories correspond more to commercial necessities than to any kind of psychological or sociological realities (Beckett 2009). In other words, it’s useful for marketing purposes to specify the age of Young Adult readers but this bears little resemblance to the actual readership.

Beckett adds that the creation of the category of Young Adult Fiction has actually resulted in an:

…increased blurring of the borders between adult and juvenile fiction and a growing intersection of readerships (2009: 23).

Dr Anthony Eaton (2010) suggests that defining the concept of young adulthood is inhibited by measuring it against the markers of ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’. He proposes that young adulthood should not be considered a transitional stage between childhood and adulthood but instead should be given the status of occupying a ‘liminal space – one effectively defined as much by the characteristics and demands of its own identity as it is by the polarised markers of “childhood” and “adulthood”’ (2010: 1).

Donelson and Nilsen attempt to define the intended readership by describing young adults as including high school students and high school graduates who are ‘still finding their way into adult life’ (2009: 3). They also describe Young Adult literature as anything read by choice or through school by readers between ‘the approximate ages of 12 to 18’ (2009: 3).

I’d argue those two definitions contradict each other. Most high school graduates are older than 18, and readers aged between 12 and 18 read a wide range of books that extend beyond Young Adult Fiction at both ends.

Author and literature expert, Michael Cart agrees Donelson and Nilsen that the ‘modern sense’ of the term ‘young adults’ is those aged ‘somewhere between twelve and nineteen years of age’ (2011: 12). He references the Young Adult Services Division of the American Library Association which states that young adults are individuals from 12 to 18 years old (Cart 2011: 8).  

I tend to agree with Nodelman when he defines young adults more broadly, suggesting that the group represents anyone in the process of ‘changing from a child into an adult’ (2008: 58). However, most people probably still consider a young adult to be a person between the ages of 12 and 19. Just with a bit of wiggle room at either end.

Of course, this is just the implied readership because, as we know, lots of Young Adult Fiction readers are not young adults at all. But that’s a whole other story.

For more on this topic, I discuss the issue of identity in YA fiction in this article and how to define Young Adult Fiction at all here.

References:

• Booth, E. & Bhuva N. (2020) The Expectations That We Be Educators: The Views of Australian Authors of Young Adult Fiction on Their OwnVoices Novels as Windows for Learning about Marginalized Experiences. Journal of Research on Libraries & Young Adults Vol. 11 No. 1 Web, accessed 15 April 2021
• Cart, M. (2011). Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism. American Library Association
• Donelson, K.L. and Nilsen, A. P. (2009). Literature for Today’s Young Adults (Eighth), Pearson
• Gruner, E. R. (2019) Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan UK. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/lib/canberra/detail.action?docID=5836143
• Nikolajeva, M. (1996). Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic. Garland Publishing Inc.
• Nodelman, P. (2008). The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. John Hopkins University Press.
• Reynolds, K. (2007). Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. Palgrave MacMillan.
• Rose, J. (1984). The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (First.). London: The MacMillan Press Ltd.
• Scutter, H. (1999) Displaced Fictions – Contemporary Fiction for Teenagers and Young Adults, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

Cite This Article:

Gibson, T. (2023). Who are the ‘Young Adults’ in Young Adult Fiction? – Tom Gibson Creative. [online] Available at: https://tomgibsoncreative.com/who-are-the-young-adults-in-young-adult-fiction/

Related posts:

What Makes a Good Young Adult Novel? What Exactly is Young Adult Fiction?