)ORULGD6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\/LEUDULHV 2018 Why Young Adult Fiction: From 1960s to Today Eleanor Cleveland Follow this and additional works at DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES WHY YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE: FROM 1960s TO TODAY By ELEANOR CLEVELAND A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in the Major Degree Awarded: Spring, 2018 1 The members of the Defense Committee approve the thesis of Eleanor Cleveland defended on April 19, 2018. Professor Ned Stuckey-French Thesis Director Dr. Melissa Gross Outside Committee Member Dr. Leigh Edwards Committee Member 2 INTRODUCTION Young adult literature is a genre or category of books that are written for teenagers and feature a teenage protagonist. This genre has created confusion, however, with its meaning, intended audience and what should qualify. As Michael Cart notes, the term is “…inherently amorphous, for its constituent terms ‘young adult’ and ‘literature’ are dynamic, changing as culture and society – which provide their context – change” (“The Value of Young Adult Literature”). This makes the term have different meanings to each generation, and it forces the question of what can, or should, qualify for teenagers and young adults to read. These debates started with the first novel published as young adult, S.E. Hinton’s 1966 debut, The Outsiders, which wasn’t what adults wanted their teenagers to be reading, though it depicted the reality they were living. Young adult literature didn’t exist until the late 1960s, with this publication, and though there were a few novels before then that were very early “adolescent” novels, they were always published as adult books.