Negotiating the Age Divide in British Teen and Young Adult Fiction from the 1970s to the Present

Abstract

Children’s literature has always been based on a paradox, an impossibility inherent in the adult author’s endeavour to recapture the child’s point of view s/he has long lost. This paper will engage with this essential paradox by proposing a theoretical approach to the issue of age drawing on a corpus of novels for teenagers and young adults published in Britain in the last fifty years. Writing for a young readership requires negotiating the relationship between the recognition of the child’s specificity, often materialized in children’s books in settings conveniently yet unrealistically deserted by adults, or in isolated places like dens or wastelands, and the depiction of what children’s literature is all about: growing up, i.e. experiencing the transition from one state to another. The evolution of this literature has followed that of Western society’s representation of and relationship to childhood: challenging the establishment and especially adult authority, as Roald Dahl’s heroes used to do from the 1960s to the 1980s, has become acceptable behaviour on the part of children and teenagers. The emphasis is no longer on the adult/child conflict or opposition but on the continuum between the two states and the in-betweenness of adolescence. And what used to be a minor genre has become sociologically, economically and literarily legitimized to the extent that children’s literature can now be said to have “come of age” itself, making the notions of minor vs major genres irrelevant, as does the phenomenon of “crossover literature” (books read across age barriers).