Is YA a site of academic study?

Ask Alice is an online column written by our former Secretary, Dr Alice Boer-Endacott, who has published several young adult fantasy novels and a non-fiction mini, under ‘A B Endacott’.

Ask Alice is designed to unpack all aspects of the Australian young adult literary scene, so if you’ve got a question, go ahead and Ask Alice!

As many of you may know, I recently finished my PhD. As I cast about for my next research focus, I realised that when trawling through academic literature about identity, meaningful books, and fandoms, I didn’t really encounter much about Young Adult fiction specifically.

Academic research is a curious beast; you can easily miss entire fields because you aren’t using the precise keywords. Much of my research experience has been trawling through articles and experimenting with search terms until the breadcrumbs I’ve painstakingly accrued unlock an entire field of academics, relevant terminology, and the information I seek.

However, given how little I’d encountered, I started to wonder: what academic research on YA is out there? 

It’s hard to find, and the research on Young Adult fiction is oddly fragmented across several subfields. In answering this question, I’m going to present this column in a semi-academic format (what can I say, I miss my PhD?).

That fragmentation, and what I’d argue is an enduring niche relegation of this academic focus, is curious to me. As one of the articles I found pointed out: “children’s and YA librarians as they are also (in the US, at least) one of the most attacked groups of people in terms of bans, challenges, and legislation that is criminalising putting books into people’s hands” (Corbett & Phillips, 2022, p. 10). Moreover, “we have all of us been children and teenagers, which means we have all been, at some point, the target audience for these books” (Williams, 2023, p.1).

So, YA novels are a type of book that most people are going to read in their lives and which speaks to their experience at that point in their lives (as opposed to say, murder mysteries, which people may go their entire lives never reading, and – hopefully – never personally experiencing). YA novels are also the focus of most efforts to ban, censor, or curtail in some way. Surely these reasons make it worthy of study.

With that in mind, I return to: what research is actually out there on YA?

Well, actually, quite a bit. However, it took me a fair amount of time to locate because, as noted, academic investigation into Young Adult literature occurs across several different fields. 

In a 2022 journal article, Corbett and Phillips identify two primary types of scholars. First, “book people,” whose interest in studying YA comes from a literary perspective. They’re inclined to look at stuff like the literary construction of the text (devices, structure, thematic elements). Within this, scholars might be “reading against the grain” to “unpick the text and its ideology,” and then “reading with the grain” which examines how a text is put together (2022: p. 9).

The other group of scholars are “child people,” who are interested in the “pedagogical, moral, and social functions on children’s literature” (Corbette & Phillips, 2022: p. 5). In other words, this latter group focuses on the book as a product of particular circumstances, which in turn affects the circumstances and environment into which it is released.

Two interesting things arise: First, something you might almost not have noticed: the bundling up of YA literature with children’s literature. Second, what Cooper and Phillips observe as a “lack of collaboration between different fields of YA scholarship” (2022: p. 5).

Let’s take a closer look at some of those different fields. One key field of YA scholarship focuses on its readership. Corbette and Phillips’ identification of “child people” – those concerned with the way the book is positioned for and received by its readers is a little reductive, and needs to be expanded. As Williams points out in her 2023 book, The Necessity of young Adult Fiction: The Literary Agenda, “further blurring the category of YA is the fact that the readership is often more ‘A’ than ‘Y’ ” (p. 3). She further points out that the likelihood of adults reading YA risks erasing teenagers from the conversation about books which are nominally created for them.

Interrogating this a bit more, YA as a phenomenon is unusual because its designated audience is dynamic and exists in a liminal state; not children but not adults. Williams articulates, rather beautifully, that YA texts: “render the experience of being sidelined [which, let’s face it, teenagers often are, despite their solipsism] and then offer examples of how readers might imagine themselves as people with agency in the world” (2023: p. 4). Annika Herb emphasises this in a 2024 journal article, noting YA literature often reverses the structural and social powerlessness of teenagers by rendering them powerful (2024: p.9). Nowhere else is this more apparent in fantasy or science fiction Young Adult texts when the disempowerment of teenagers is structurally reflected through the text’s worldbuilding (and then, often, resisted by the plot). Williams sums up the way YA texts reflect the experience of their teenage readership: “Unlike, for example, ‘detective fiction,’ ‘YA literature’ is at once a designation of content and audience—an audience that is always in the midst of transforming” (2023, p. 3).

However, the transience of the teenage readership is a complicating factor. Something said all the way back in 1996 by Christine Hunt remains true, and, I argue, complicates the way we understand and approach the study of YA and its readership: “Can we speak of any kind of permanent canon in a field where the ‘real’ readers, the young adults themselves, value ‘now’ to the virtual exclusion of whatever is not ‘now’?” (p. 7). Adolescents change, and thus what was relevant to them at the time they read it, isn’t necessarily as relevant to them at a later point in their life. More importantly, these texts aren’t necessarily relevant to future adolescents because adolescents are so much more sensitive to changing societal issues and circumstances.

That isn’t to say readers won’t fondly remember texts which were meaningful to them at a particular time in their lives. However, people’s relationship to them changes, not just because they were read during a dynamic time in their own lives, but because the content is likely to date faster than other genres. Hunt would seem to agree. She notes it is difficult to form a ‘canon’ of YA texts because the intended readership is so dynamic and the focus of so many YA texts are so grounded in contemporary attitudes, norms, and phenomena; things which change with relative rapidity, especially for adolescents.

As we know, the teenagers at whom YA is aimed, especially girls, are often more across social issues and changing social norms. Consider, for instance, the evolution of language and norms around say, LGBTQIA+ issues across the last 10 years. For teenagers especially, these changing norms are adopted far more quickly than by the general population. Any book which isn’t across evolving attitudes, language, and depictions of LGBTQIA+ characters is likely to be received as somewhat archaic by a YA readership (for more on this, check out The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature (Matos, 2024)).

While this is only one example, it speaks to what kind of academic studies are conducted into teenaged readers of YA. However, this relatively transient relevance does also suggest why it might be difficult to pin down particular texts as a focus of study.

That doesn’t mean Young Adult fiction and its readership shouldn’t be – and isn’t – studied. But it does mean that the study of it has complications. However, I’d argue it’s those complicating elements which renders it so fascinating a site for study. Moreover, I would love a bit more research into the seeming paradox of the fact that 74% of YA readers are adults, and 28% of all YA readers are over the age of 28. As Corbett and Phillips observe, “we’re cutting YA off from the wider context in which it exists if we’re not talking to teachers, producers, fans, fanfic writers, and young people themselves” (2022: p. 13).

Another dimension of academic research into YA texts aligns with what we might more traditionally think of when we speak about literary studies: studying the content of the texts themselves. This is the work of Corbett and Phillips’ ‘book people.’ An example of it is Leah Phillips’ 2023 book, Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction. In the book’s opening chapter, Phillips draws a parallel between Cinderella (who, she argues, is constructed as a ‘prize’ for the male characters), and female protagonists in YA fantasy. She uses Katniss Everdeen and Bella Swan as examples of female protagonists in YA fantasy (already an issue as The Hunger Games is dystopian – not fantasy – and Twilight is urban/contemporary fantasy) and claims the two protagonists still are prizes and undergo experiences and associated with Cinderella, such as the transformative makeover. There’s certainly something to ruminate on in this analysis, although upon finishing the chapter I was not fully convinced.

However, the book goes on to explore the site of YA fantasy protagonists’ bodies and their treatment in various books to show how books can and do throw off a ‘Cinderella’/prize narrative (or not). She even uses my beloved Alanna from Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness Quartet in a dedicated chapter, noting that YA fantasy texts can subvert traditional narrative conventions and tropes, and “in so doing, they offer a model of selfhood recognizing plurality and change, forming through connection and kinship” (Phillips, 2023: p. 20).

Phillips’ book is only one example, but it illustrates how YA can be just as examined like any other text. If I hop up on my soapbox, I’d also suggest that it goes some way to belie certain perspectives about YA being somehow less ‘literary’ than other types of writing. Hunt makes an interesting point about why this academic focus of a deep-dive into the construction and contents of a particular text may still be marginalised, even today: “Because young adult literature is marketed as, essentially, a disposable record of a fleeting moment, the theory that accompanies it is more likely to focus on social issues than on literary theory. Critics, understandably, find it more feasible to study the phenomena than to analyze the books themselves, which are often read simply as documents of an ever-changing adolescent social scene” (Hunt, 1996: p. 6). Certainly, it’s food for thought.

A final dimension of academic focus is how YA texts can be taught in schools. Xiaomei Sun (2024) looking at teaching YA in secondary classrooms for ESL students, argues the relatability of the protagonists in YA texts means students are more inclined to “actively engage in the reading” of the texts. She points out YA texts are especially useful in this context because they can be taught from four different directions: “text, context, reader and language” meaning that there are many ‘entry points’ or ways a student can engage with these texts. In other words, YA texts can have particular value on a syllabus because teenagers can more immediately and easily relate to the experiences and characters presented within them. This is especially important when dealing with students who may struggle to connect with a more ‘traditional’ English syllabus.

To be honest, I’m surprised that academic scholarship on YA isn’t more popular or mainstream. I can’t help but feel there’s still an enduring snobbishness and stigma which is liked to perceptions of YA texts being somehow more ‘basic’ or ‘easy’ to write (and read) than texts from other genres and for other readerships. However, that’s a feeling I don’t have the data to properly substantiate.

Perhaps, if I dust off the chip on my shoulder, it’s simply because the field is so fragmented, as this very column has explored. There are, however, moves to unify the field. This can be seen in many places. For one, the Corbette and Phillips article explicitly notes the various branches of the field, but places them in cohabitation alongside one another. Another example, the Matos book I briefly mentioned, looks at the question of writing queer narratives in YA literature from a variety of these perspectives. Finally, the YA Studies Association as a body seems to be doing great work to act as a formal unifier of those different branches. If you peruse the conference lineup from November last year, you can see that all of these lenses are present, which is a really exciting step forward to unifying the field.

At the end of this, you might be thinking ‘ok Alice, but I’m not an academic, so this is interesting but not necessarily super relevant.’ Three comments, here:
First, research does often trickle down into our everyday lives, especially in educational environments, when research can inform teacher training, which directly links to what happens in the classroom.

Second, funding applications for initiatives and programs are often strengthened when there is research that can be referenced in those applications.

Finally, an expansive body of well-publicised research into a particular field signals to the broader public that this is something that they should care about.

I can only hope this month’s column contributes to that unifying effort – and these three outcomes – in some small way.

Academic References: 

Corbett, E., & Phillips, L. (2022). Ploughing the Field: (Inter)disciplinary Approaches to YA. International Journal of Young Adult Literature, 3(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.24877/ijyal.107

Herb, A. (2024). ‘Everywhere’s Burning’: Realising Climate Change and Activism Through Bushfires in Australian Young Adult Literature. The International Journal of Young Adult Literature, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.24877/IJYAL.141

Hunt, C. (1996). Young Adult Literature Evades the Theorists. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 21(1), 4–11.

Matos, A. D. (2024). The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature. Routledge.

Phillips, L. (2023). Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction: Reforming Myths of Adolescent Girlhood. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional.

Sun, X. (2024). Teaching young adult literature in secondary L2 classrooms: A case study of The Outsiders reading programme. Language Learning Journal, 52(3), 233–254. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2022.2107694

Williams, D. L. (2023). The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction: The Literary Agenda | Oxford Academic. Oxford University Press.