This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
Is there any interest here in a WikiProject for the family of articles comprising children's and young adult literature coverage? I've made a proposal for a WikiProject, and I encourage people to view my proposal, edit it if they like, and sign up. It would be great to put an organised effort into rethinking these pages.
Wikipedia:Wikiproject/List_of_proposed_projects#Children.27s_Literature
Deborah-jl Talk 06:15, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
Please see my post at Talk:Children's_literature#Globalization for reasons for this tag, as well as suggestions about which works to add to solve this problem.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk 16:37, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
Per agreement, I've removed the list to its own page. Personally, I'd like to get rid of both list of young adult authors and list of children's literature authors; there's a fuzzy border between them and it seems to me that the list could be much better maintained with categories. Comments? Deborah-jl 15:26, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
This page was recently vandelised, probably best if an eye is kept on it! (Million Moments 19:42, 15 February 2007 (UTC)) — Preceding unsigned comment added by M G Tuffen ( talk • contribs) 18:42, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
User:Mike Klaassen has added multiple external links to articles that he wrote himself. They need to be checked against Wikipedia's self-promotion and no original research policies. — Lowellian ( reply) 16:12, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Hi, In the article on young adulthood, it is stated that Sarah Trimmer first noted this period in 1802. I'm currently doing a PhD on young adult literature and urgently need to find where this reference came from. Can anyone help me with this please? My address is charlene.okane@gmail.com and I would appreciate any information.
Many thanks, -- Charlene87 ( talk) 19:45, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
Why is RussBot inserting a hyphen into the title of this article? I have never seen young adult spelled with a hyphen. GUllman 20:25, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't wish to argue either side of this issue, but I will ask a question motivated only by curiosity.
I have never seen the term "science fiction novel" hyphenated. Why is that? I notice that "science" and "fiction" are always nouns, whereas both "young" and "adult" can be used as either a noun or an adjective. Is is proper not to hyphenate the modifier "science fiction" because both terms are nouns, whereas it IS proper to hyphenate the modifier "young-adult" because both terms are adjectives?
If this is the case, some of the inconsistency might be explained by the fact that both "young" and "adult" are also nouns. KennyLucius 20:38, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
After reading the Light Novel article, I added a Light Novel section to Young-adult Fiction. Mike Klaassen ( talk) 20:52, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
"YA novels are often as short as 16000 words," did not make any sense to me. That's the length of a novelette, it's not even novella length. I'd expect that kind of word count from a chapter book, not a YA novel. My understanding of YA novels was that they ranged from 50K to 75K, sometimes longer. Even if there are YA novels that are 16,000 words long, it doesn't seem accurate to say it happens "often." I have not seen the reference in the footnotes myself. Is it referring to the same type of fiction as this article is? ( Katrinakadabra ( talk) 13:19, 6 September 2009 (UTC))
Target consumers and age rating are genres now?
So 2 complete diferent things, like a sex comedy and a dark science fiction could be renamed as genre: "Mature". ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.220.147.45 ( talk) 14:35, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
Some of these books are debatable as YA lit...in fact many of them are subject to ongoing arguments online and in lit journals about whether they are YA. The author's intended audience should matter in its classification. You can't say just because teens like to read these books or are assigned them in school that they are teen books. Flowers for Algernon, for example, is constantly placed in the YA section at libraries because it is assigned in classes and is a favorite of teens, but it has an adult protagonist. Also, even if these books have young protagonists, many of them are books that adults feel they have to read with teens (hence assigning them in school) to help them ascertain the meaning or to deal with difficult sections. Shouldn't YA lit be books teen can read on their own and understand? I suggest at least hinting that there is some discussion about whether these books are YA or not. Also, the notable authors section seems random, just including whatever authors the writers remember. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.202.234.209 ( talk) 02:49, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
I would like to propose that Young Adult Literature (YA Lit) be merged into this article. This article appears to receive heavier traffic, and the other is an orphan. I feel that the two articles are similar enough and cover the same subject matter, and therefore there is no need for two articles. Anyone care to weigh in? 75.69.147.36 ( talk) 03:22, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
The article mentions age ranges including 14 to 22, 12 to 18, and 10 to 20 (midpoints 16, 15, 15) and implies some consensus that YA does (perhaps for fifty years or so) target middle and older teenagers, at least. Here are some contrary references.
[Carter2000] = Best Books for Young Adults, second edition, Betty Carter with Sally Estes and Linda Waddle, YALSA, ALA, 2000. ISBN 0-838-93501-X
Some points from pages 1-13. (For more about the lists gleaned from this source see Talk:Young Adult Library Services Association#ALA Best Books for Young Adults.)
"BOOK ENDS: Prize Problems", Richard R. Lingeman, The New York Times, April 10, 1977, page BR19.
-- P64 ( talk) 16:59, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
Up for review Your instructor has asked me to look at the outlines for changes that you plan to make to this article. It appears that you have yet to create an outline on this talk page, so it's not possible for me to provide feedback. Please bear in mind that I will be happy to help you, but I can't do that if you don't make any effort yourself. Pacing yourself is key to this assignment and since semester is mostly over, you really need to ensure that you're keeping up with project. — Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 05:24, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
Young-adult literature redirects here. We do not have young-adult books. (Contrast: children's fiction and children's books both redirect to children's literature.)
The lead implies that we have it backward in this respect. Although difficult to describe, I suspect that the young-adult category is more fundamental than fiction in the book publishing and library industries. -- P64 ( talk) 20:02, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
Very recent edits improve existing listings. During the previous several weeks (May/June) we have these adds and drops.
Here is a tally of births by decade for the 56 purportedly notable authors (except Rae Bridgman, year of birth missing, whose earliest earliest publication date for this notable work is 2006).
This report is now complete in that I have checked and corrected my two-day-old clerical work. -P64 2012-06-25/27
Another editor has deleted the entire section with no other change.
I check all four-digit numbers, don't see many fives! P64 ( talk) 15:49, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
I added a mention of the word "Juvenile fiction". This term is mostly obsolete, but a lot of the YA fiction from the mid-century was published under this category name (most particularly the Scribner's juvenile line, I believe). There is a subtle difference between the old "juvenile" category and today's YA-- juveniles most notably did not deal with "adult" themes--and with some time it would be useful to discuss this, but in fact the categories today are so overlapping that the novels published as juvenile fifty years ago now fit seamlessly into the YA category today. Actually, the term isn't that obsolete, in that it's still being used at Random House and elsewhere
Geoffrey.landis 18:45, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
There is a discussion of the YA problem novel included in the (duplicate) articles Problem novel and Problem fiction, but this topic really belongs here. Perhaps, as a beginning, the appropriate paragraph in the Problem novel article could be copied to this article. Does this make sense? Rwood128 ( talk) 22:28, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Children's literature#Middle Grade and Young Adult
--cross-reference by "postor" P64 ( talk) 17:08, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
I removed reverted this addition because it seems arguable to me and is not cited. Thoughts? HullIntegrity ( talk) 12:03, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
I just started on this page, and didn't have much time today. If anyone would like to help I'm more than willing to accept. I'd like to have a timeline of some of the more important influences from the beginning of the YA lit genre and some of the main writers who have come out of it, such as Robert Heinlein and Judy Blume. I'd also like to start a list of books, or at least authors with links to outside sources to where the books can be found or at least summaries.-- Steeley42 20:55, 11 August 2004 (UTC)
This sub-genre: the Young Adult Dystopian Novel, deserves, given its remarkably steep ascendance in current popular culture, its own section and discreet history. We came here trying to trace the history and development of this genre in a discussion about the place The Giver holds in its development, and could not find much useful information in these YA articles. Nesdon ( talk) 19:35, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
I have made several changes to the "Mid-Century" tag under "History," primarily to address ambiguities, poor or misleading phrasing, and gaps in information. In the first paragraph, I changed "advent of modern publishing for the teen romance market" to "advent of modern young-adult publishing surrounding the teen romance market" because the original seemed to suggest that modern publishing as a whole rose up around the teen romance market and it needlessly separates "teen romance" from YA, even though teen romance falls under the category of YA. Other changes I made in this paragraph were to add "influential" between "two novels," since it seems off-base to imply that these were the only two novels that drew in adolescent readers and the original didn't make clear that they were especially important. I also added that the novels "were not initially marketed to adolescents," unlike later YA, as I thought it would be worthwhile to emphasize that neither the writers nor the publishers intended for these novels to be YA.
In the second paragraph, I put the publication date of The Outsiders in parenthesis as was done for the previous two novels mentioned. I also did more extensive rewording of the next several sentences to aid clarity and flow of information, and to avoid making broad definitive statements such as "it displayed a truer, darker side of adolescent life because it was written by a young adult." Instead, I included the more specific information that The Outsiders was written by Hinton during high school and published when she was only 17. I cited this information as well as information about Hinton's broader importance in YA history as author of one of the best-selling YA novels of all time and one of the founders of the genre. 128.237.185.15 ( talk) 04:47, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
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I've moved the page from Young-adult fiction to Young adult fiction because it seems to be the most common spelling variety and is used in the body more than the hyphenated version. Feel free to request a change back to the original if this seems unreasonable. Me, Myself & I (☮) ( talk) 02:01, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
The cited source - here - defines "young adults" as aged 12-18. The information should not be changed, unless a different reliable source is cited. Ghmyrtle ( talk) 11:19, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
I found that everything seems to be in order and looks good. The page remains neutral, it has plenty of citations for all of the claims it makes, is well organized, coherent and doesn’t allow for any distractions. The article also provides an excellent history of young adult fiction and catalogues some of the most important young adult fiction works like Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies. The article also claims that the 20th century is the pivotal point for young adult literature and includes the previously mentioned titles as the catalysts for the rise of young adult fiction in the mid-20th century. In this section, there is a bevy of sources that can back up this claim and evidence to support this claim, as seen with the first mainstream young adult novels in the 1950’s, to the 60s and 70s when young adult fiction became a true force in literary circles, to the 80s when authors began to cover controversial themes such as rape and suicide, and finally to today when young adult fiction has become a money-making force with titles such as Harry Potter and Twilight. If I were to add anything, it would to be that some sources would need to be improved, it even said so on the page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jfunchion ( talk • contribs) 14:45, 28 March 2018 (UTC)
Hi all, I just published the sections that I've been working on on the main wiki page. I am still taking a look at some of the sections (history, boundaries b/w) that I didn't look at previously to get them on the same level as the rest of the article. Kaylac8215 ( talk) 20:09, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
Is there some kind of contest amongst editors to see how many times Harry Potter can be mentioned in this article? Seriously. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 147.85.186.6 ( talk) 22:14, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
The statement "differences in genre styles between YA fiction and adult fiction" is cited by a single source behind a paywall and lacks a page reference. Also, "adult fiction" is poorly defined as 'adult' fiction can also refer to 'erotica'. This needs a better source or should be removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.89.104.23 ( talk) 00:45, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Kaylac8215.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 05:21, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
Young adult novels are primarily aimed at adolescents, so why is this type of novel bizarrely called young adult fiction? The article should state how this type of novel gained its misleading name. Why isn't it called adolescent fiction, teen fiction, high school fiction or coming-of-age fiction? I'm not suggesting the article's name be changed; I realise WP call it that because that's its common name - but why did it become called young adult fiction? Magazines aimed at adolescents aren't termed young adult magazines. Films aimed at an adolescent audience aren't called young adult films. No-one would describe their 15-year-old son/daughter/niece/nephew as a young adult - yet they'd likely buy them a novel that's described as young adult, knowing that it's designed for people their age. A teacher whose pupils are 15 wouldn't say that (s)he teaches young adults. Jim Michael ( talk) 11:04, 8 September 2017 (UTC)
Hi all! I will be working on this wiki for a class project. I will be doing basic copyediting and reformatting, as well as adding a section talking about Diversity in YA lit. If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave them down below. Kaylac8215 ( talk) 00:35, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
Over the past few weeks, I have been going through the current article and the talk page to figure out how I want to restructure this article. Right now, the structure of the article is very poor. Nothing flows properly and it's full of random subsections. I want to work on making these flow a little bit better. Here are some of my thoughts so far:
Ideas for Diversity in YA Lit section:
Kaylac8215 ( talk) 21:57, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
Here are some sources that I'm considering to use. I'm still compiling resources. Lack of Diversity:
Rise of Diversity:
Why Diversity is Important:
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Kaylac8215 ( talk • contribs) 01:37, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
Text and/or other creative content from Young adult fiction was copied or moved into Diversity in young adult fiction with this edit. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. |
A wikipedia article is not an appropriate place to push your diversity agenda. The diversity section is nearly a half of the article. Please summarize. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 147.85.172.6 ( talk) 20:54, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
Diversity is just one component of many recent trends in Young Adult literature, and framing it as a completely separate subdivision at its length and stated significant is an obvious case of undue weight and personal agenda. Try to mix the information into a more appropriate part of the article where it's more relevant and proportionate. 51.37.57.129 ( talk) 15:20, 1 January 2019 (UTC)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 January 2020 and 15 April 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Noelamb7.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 05:21, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
The Criticism section of this article has multiple issues. The only sources included are the works of one professor alongside miscellaneous opinion pieces, including one from questionable source Salon. None of the sources appear to indicate any consensus or provide any secondary coverage of these opinions. This section gives WP:UNDUE weight to individual ideas that don't meet notability standards beyond WP:FRINGE. As per WP:CRIT, this section appears to be counterproductive, and I propose its removal. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 00:28, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
Who defines consensus? If a few conservatives complained about YA fiction why does that merit being placed into the criticism section as representative of consensus but not criticisms from the left? What meets notability standards? Give me the exact number of citations needed for something to be classified as representative of consensus and thus notable as proper criticism. There is substantial criticism of commercial capitalist pop culture coming from the left that doesn't just focus upon its being non-diverse. It is a commercial consumerist phenomenon. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2405:6E00:31EE:9A00:E5B9:A204:EE38:A239 ( talk) 01:40, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
an author's analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources, the primary sources being the YA genre books. I don't think the Slate article is properly summarized, as the editor who added it fixated on Frey's scheme, which is just a minor blip in the YA world.Between us, we've collected a number of good sources, you're welcome to improve that section. And if a better section heading than "criticism" occurs to you, go for it. Schazjmd (talk) 21:51, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 August 2022 and 6 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Iwritesometimes ( article contribs). Peer reviewers: TheWarlock42.
— Assignment last updated by DarthVetter ( talk) 20:27, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2011 Q3 term. Further details are available on the course page.
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on 14:57, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
Hello! For class I was asked to evaluate and article and provide feedback. This is my first time doing an article eval (or anything wiki related) so any feedback is welcome! I decided to specifically focus on the content of the article so here were some things that I had noticed:
Harry Potter is harmful? J.K. Rowling is harmful? Those are not facts. They are the opinions of some people. Zaslav ( talk) 00:56, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
I don't find this article highly reliable. It is misleading about the age of the YA genre, which dates back to the 1940's at least and was in libraries in the 1950's at latest despite the article's assertion that "booksellers and libraries began creating young adult sections" in the 1960's. The following parenthesis, "(although some had long existed)", is not enough to overcome the false impression that creation began in the 1960's. Hence I added a word to get "more booksellers and libraries began creating young adult sections". This may seem trivial but I've read in two recent newspaper articles that Judy Blue created YA fiction in 1960. (Yes, in both the New York Times and the Guardian.) Somehow, the history is getting muddied. Care is required. Zaslav ( talk) 01:05, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
A new problem: The article said: The Outsiders ", and was the first novel published specifically marketed for young adults"—I'm deleting this because it cannot be true. All Heinlein's juveniles in the 1950s must have been marketed to young adults because they were written for the YA/juvenile line, i.e., for teenage boys. I read the cited article "The Outsiders reinvented young adult fiction. Harry Potter made it inescapable." and it does not claim The Outsiders created the marketing genre. It only says "initially, The Outsiders was marketed to adults, and it flopped." Then, "It wasn’t until a few years later, when publishers saw that the vast majority of the book’s sales were coming from school libraries, that the book found its true market: teenagers." This is not at all about the YA genre. Zaslav ( talk) 22:52, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
The modern style of young-adult fiction originated during the 1960s, after the publication of S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967).. It is supported by the Vox article which says, about The Outsiders,
it would also help to create the publishing category of young adult fiction as we know it todayand The New Yorker which says
For Hinton, who almost single-handedly brought the Y.A. genre into being, this marks a kind of transgenerational full-circle return.Schazjmd (talk) 23:05, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
I listened to a recent CBC radio discussion that suggested that Judy Blume was an important writer of adolescent fiction. This was in reference to a documentary about her < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neWsO1Rk_q0>. I am, therefore, surprised that she isn't even mentioned in this article. Rwood128 ( talk) 12:51, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
Hi User:Danbloch Your recent edits were useful – they made me think further, and realise that I should have taken more care..
However, I was amazed to find no mention of Philip Pullman here! – as I was earlier with Judy Blume.
YA fiction is a sub-category of Children's literature and that article has a much fuller discussion of YA authors than this does. When I discovered this I wondered if it might be a good idea to merge these two articles and so avoid duplication and the wasting of editors' time?
The opening sentence of the lede is problematic: "Young adult fiction (YA) is a category of fiction written for readers from 12 to 18 years of age. [1] [2] Isn't it in fact a "category" created by librarians and publishers rather than writers? Though some writers obviously write for this "market". Rwood128 ( talk) 13:20, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
I realise it is hard being a librarian, especially in some parts of the world. Amazon says this about the second book of Le Guin's Earthsea series: "Teens, especially, will be inspired by the way Le Guin allows her characters to evolve and grow into their own powers". The book is also described as a fantasy classic and as read by many adults.
I find the idea of young adult fiction helping to provide a transition between child and adult literature a little odd (patronising?). I consumed 2 or 3 used adult SF paperback novels a week, in my early teens, and also read adult novels in my grandmother's bookcase, when I stayed with her. -- Rwood128 ( talk) 20:53, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
References
The recent trend in banning book for children parallels what happened in the first half of the twentieth century with Modernist novelists James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and others.Then the emphasis was on keeping women in the dark, as far as was possible, especially with regard to anything sexual. The topic of YA fiction and censorship is important and needs to be expanded. Rwood128 ( talk) 17:12, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
The criticisms in the section 21st century seem irrelevant to me. They do not have anything specifically to do with young adult fiction, and they could be raised about any genre of literature. Are these appropriate for this article?— Anita5192 ( talk) 17:22, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Young adult fiction's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.
Reference named "Time":
I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. Feel free to remove this comment after fixing the refs. AnomieBOT ⚡ 15:47, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
The section on the classroom states: "Students who read YA are more likely to appreciate literature and have stronger reading skills than others". So YA authors don't produce works of literature?!! Rwood128 ( talk) 22:58, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
This article needs to clarify what it means by young adult fiction. To this non-specialist, it seems to be (1) Fiction specifically written for contemporary teenagers that deals with the issues that they face growing up now. This includes works by Judy Blume and the Harry Potter series. (2) Any fiction where the subject matter is appropriate for teenage and whose protagonists are often teenagers. This would include so-called classic novels, like Alice in Wonderland, Tom Sawyer and The Catcher in the Rye. Classics appear also be defined in terms of length, ideas, sentence structure, vocabulary, and especiallt that they are set in a time and cuulture foreign to contemporary teenagers, as. for example, Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter. It also needs to be noted in the article that terms teenager and young adult are fairly recent inventions. -- Rwood128 ( talk) 12:17, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
Anita5192, this is rather vague – are you indicating that you find the sources I describe as looking "most interesting" unreliable? -- Rwood128 ( talk) 19:38, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
Dan Bloch I now better understand your objection to including The Lords of the Ring in this article, but if that isn't YA, numerous other works included here also aren't, especially fantasy? Would you agree that YA fiction began in 1967 and that this is a distinctly new genre from earlier teenage literature, and adult literature that children can enjoy? -- Rwood128 ( talk) 21:20, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
The success of Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly, published in 1942, is generally acknowledged as the impetus for romance novels specifically written for teenage girls, although Daly considered her novel to be written for adults. Young adult romance novels were referred to as junior novels and sometimes malt shop novels.Schazjmd (talk) 23:08, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
Just found: This definition, from the Young Adult Library Services Association, needs to be considered:
Also, the article does not mention this American context, or consider YA in any language other than English. -- Rwood128 ( talk) 11:37, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
Rwood128, the blockquote from Cart splitting off from a sentence fragment is awkward and unnecessary. It could easily be summarized without needing to quote it directly. Schazjmd (talk) 22:38, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
Rwood128 ( talk) 14:38, 18 May 2023 (UTC) -- Rwood128 ( talk) 18:01, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
A quick search of the Times Literary Supplement suggests that the term YA was not (or rarely) used in the UK, at least in the 1960s-80s, but rather "teeenage", "junior", adolescent". -- Rwood128 ( talk) 18:01, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
References
Dan Bloch, Perhaps I'm just being picky but I find this section, inadequate and poorly written. I thought my objections were clear enough. Anyhow, when I can find the time, I'll work on improving this section.
Can something be done about the narrow focus of this article on American YA literature? Rwood128 ( talk) 15:42, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
In an edit today I removed the sentence However, "'young adult literature' is inherently amorphous",
[1] and "even those who study and teach it have not reached a consensus on a definition".
[2]
. These quotes are pretty good, but there are issues with using them this way. Usage like this appears awkward and is non-encyclopaedic. Sources should almost be paraphrased, not quoted directly. Something like "Young adult literature is hard to define, even by those who study it and teach it" would be fine. But when the quotes appear like this, the claim is being made in Wikipedia's voice. In order to be acceptable the author would have to to be specified inline too, e.g., "Young adult literature is hard to define ("inherently amorphous", in the words of Michael Cart)."
Note that the {{cite}}
templates have a handy quote=
parameter which lets you insert quotes in a citation without having to go through gymnastics like the above.
See Wikipedia:Quotations for more discussion about using quotes. Dan Bloch ( talk) 17:04, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
References
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
Is there any interest here in a WikiProject for the family of articles comprising children's and young adult literature coverage? I've made a proposal for a WikiProject, and I encourage people to view my proposal, edit it if they like, and sign up. It would be great to put an organised effort into rethinking these pages.
Wikipedia:Wikiproject/List_of_proposed_projects#Children.27s_Literature
Deborah-jl Talk 06:15, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
Please see my post at Talk:Children's_literature#Globalization for reasons for this tag, as well as suggestions about which works to add to solve this problem.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk 16:37, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
Per agreement, I've removed the list to its own page. Personally, I'd like to get rid of both list of young adult authors and list of children's literature authors; there's a fuzzy border between them and it seems to me that the list could be much better maintained with categories. Comments? Deborah-jl 15:26, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
This page was recently vandelised, probably best if an eye is kept on it! (Million Moments 19:42, 15 February 2007 (UTC)) — Preceding unsigned comment added by M G Tuffen ( talk • contribs) 18:42, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
User:Mike Klaassen has added multiple external links to articles that he wrote himself. They need to be checked against Wikipedia's self-promotion and no original research policies. — Lowellian ( reply) 16:12, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Hi, In the article on young adulthood, it is stated that Sarah Trimmer first noted this period in 1802. I'm currently doing a PhD on young adult literature and urgently need to find where this reference came from. Can anyone help me with this please? My address is charlene.okane@gmail.com and I would appreciate any information.
Many thanks, -- Charlene87 ( talk) 19:45, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
Why is RussBot inserting a hyphen into the title of this article? I have never seen young adult spelled with a hyphen. GUllman 20:25, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't wish to argue either side of this issue, but I will ask a question motivated only by curiosity.
I have never seen the term "science fiction novel" hyphenated. Why is that? I notice that "science" and "fiction" are always nouns, whereas both "young" and "adult" can be used as either a noun or an adjective. Is is proper not to hyphenate the modifier "science fiction" because both terms are nouns, whereas it IS proper to hyphenate the modifier "young-adult" because both terms are adjectives?
If this is the case, some of the inconsistency might be explained by the fact that both "young" and "adult" are also nouns. KennyLucius 20:38, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
After reading the Light Novel article, I added a Light Novel section to Young-adult Fiction. Mike Klaassen ( talk) 20:52, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
"YA novels are often as short as 16000 words," did not make any sense to me. That's the length of a novelette, it's not even novella length. I'd expect that kind of word count from a chapter book, not a YA novel. My understanding of YA novels was that they ranged from 50K to 75K, sometimes longer. Even if there are YA novels that are 16,000 words long, it doesn't seem accurate to say it happens "often." I have not seen the reference in the footnotes myself. Is it referring to the same type of fiction as this article is? ( Katrinakadabra ( talk) 13:19, 6 September 2009 (UTC))
Target consumers and age rating are genres now?
So 2 complete diferent things, like a sex comedy and a dark science fiction could be renamed as genre: "Mature". ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.220.147.45 ( talk) 14:35, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
Some of these books are debatable as YA lit...in fact many of them are subject to ongoing arguments online and in lit journals about whether they are YA. The author's intended audience should matter in its classification. You can't say just because teens like to read these books or are assigned them in school that they are teen books. Flowers for Algernon, for example, is constantly placed in the YA section at libraries because it is assigned in classes and is a favorite of teens, but it has an adult protagonist. Also, even if these books have young protagonists, many of them are books that adults feel they have to read with teens (hence assigning them in school) to help them ascertain the meaning or to deal with difficult sections. Shouldn't YA lit be books teen can read on their own and understand? I suggest at least hinting that there is some discussion about whether these books are YA or not. Also, the notable authors section seems random, just including whatever authors the writers remember. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.202.234.209 ( talk) 02:49, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
I would like to propose that Young Adult Literature (YA Lit) be merged into this article. This article appears to receive heavier traffic, and the other is an orphan. I feel that the two articles are similar enough and cover the same subject matter, and therefore there is no need for two articles. Anyone care to weigh in? 75.69.147.36 ( talk) 03:22, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
The article mentions age ranges including 14 to 22, 12 to 18, and 10 to 20 (midpoints 16, 15, 15) and implies some consensus that YA does (perhaps for fifty years or so) target middle and older teenagers, at least. Here are some contrary references.
[Carter2000] = Best Books for Young Adults, second edition, Betty Carter with Sally Estes and Linda Waddle, YALSA, ALA, 2000. ISBN 0-838-93501-X
Some points from pages 1-13. (For more about the lists gleaned from this source see Talk:Young Adult Library Services Association#ALA Best Books for Young Adults.)
"BOOK ENDS: Prize Problems", Richard R. Lingeman, The New York Times, April 10, 1977, page BR19.
-- P64 ( talk) 16:59, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
Up for review Your instructor has asked me to look at the outlines for changes that you plan to make to this article. It appears that you have yet to create an outline on this talk page, so it's not possible for me to provide feedback. Please bear in mind that I will be happy to help you, but I can't do that if you don't make any effort yourself. Pacing yourself is key to this assignment and since semester is mostly over, you really need to ensure that you're keeping up with project. — Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 05:24, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
Young-adult literature redirects here. We do not have young-adult books. (Contrast: children's fiction and children's books both redirect to children's literature.)
The lead implies that we have it backward in this respect. Although difficult to describe, I suspect that the young-adult category is more fundamental than fiction in the book publishing and library industries. -- P64 ( talk) 20:02, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
Very recent edits improve existing listings. During the previous several weeks (May/June) we have these adds and drops.
Here is a tally of births by decade for the 56 purportedly notable authors (except Rae Bridgman, year of birth missing, whose earliest earliest publication date for this notable work is 2006).
This report is now complete in that I have checked and corrected my two-day-old clerical work. -P64 2012-06-25/27
Another editor has deleted the entire section with no other change.
I check all four-digit numbers, don't see many fives! P64 ( talk) 15:49, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
I added a mention of the word "Juvenile fiction". This term is mostly obsolete, but a lot of the YA fiction from the mid-century was published under this category name (most particularly the Scribner's juvenile line, I believe). There is a subtle difference between the old "juvenile" category and today's YA-- juveniles most notably did not deal with "adult" themes--and with some time it would be useful to discuss this, but in fact the categories today are so overlapping that the novels published as juvenile fifty years ago now fit seamlessly into the YA category today. Actually, the term isn't that obsolete, in that it's still being used at Random House and elsewhere
Geoffrey.landis 18:45, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
There is a discussion of the YA problem novel included in the (duplicate) articles Problem novel and Problem fiction, but this topic really belongs here. Perhaps, as a beginning, the appropriate paragraph in the Problem novel article could be copied to this article. Does this make sense? Rwood128 ( talk) 22:28, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Children's literature#Middle Grade and Young Adult
--cross-reference by "postor" P64 ( talk) 17:08, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
I removed reverted this addition because it seems arguable to me and is not cited. Thoughts? HullIntegrity ( talk) 12:03, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
I just started on this page, and didn't have much time today. If anyone would like to help I'm more than willing to accept. I'd like to have a timeline of some of the more important influences from the beginning of the YA lit genre and some of the main writers who have come out of it, such as Robert Heinlein and Judy Blume. I'd also like to start a list of books, or at least authors with links to outside sources to where the books can be found or at least summaries.-- Steeley42 20:55, 11 August 2004 (UTC)
This sub-genre: the Young Adult Dystopian Novel, deserves, given its remarkably steep ascendance in current popular culture, its own section and discreet history. We came here trying to trace the history and development of this genre in a discussion about the place The Giver holds in its development, and could not find much useful information in these YA articles. Nesdon ( talk) 19:35, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
I have made several changes to the "Mid-Century" tag under "History," primarily to address ambiguities, poor or misleading phrasing, and gaps in information. In the first paragraph, I changed "advent of modern publishing for the teen romance market" to "advent of modern young-adult publishing surrounding the teen romance market" because the original seemed to suggest that modern publishing as a whole rose up around the teen romance market and it needlessly separates "teen romance" from YA, even though teen romance falls under the category of YA. Other changes I made in this paragraph were to add "influential" between "two novels," since it seems off-base to imply that these were the only two novels that drew in adolescent readers and the original didn't make clear that they were especially important. I also added that the novels "were not initially marketed to adolescents," unlike later YA, as I thought it would be worthwhile to emphasize that neither the writers nor the publishers intended for these novels to be YA.
In the second paragraph, I put the publication date of The Outsiders in parenthesis as was done for the previous two novels mentioned. I also did more extensive rewording of the next several sentences to aid clarity and flow of information, and to avoid making broad definitive statements such as "it displayed a truer, darker side of adolescent life because it was written by a young adult." Instead, I included the more specific information that The Outsiders was written by Hinton during high school and published when she was only 17. I cited this information as well as information about Hinton's broader importance in YA history as author of one of the best-selling YA novels of all time and one of the founders of the genre. 128.237.185.15 ( talk) 04:47, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
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I've moved the page from Young-adult fiction to Young adult fiction because it seems to be the most common spelling variety and is used in the body more than the hyphenated version. Feel free to request a change back to the original if this seems unreasonable. Me, Myself & I (☮) ( talk) 02:01, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
The cited source - here - defines "young adults" as aged 12-18. The information should not be changed, unless a different reliable source is cited. Ghmyrtle ( talk) 11:19, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
I found that everything seems to be in order and looks good. The page remains neutral, it has plenty of citations for all of the claims it makes, is well organized, coherent and doesn’t allow for any distractions. The article also provides an excellent history of young adult fiction and catalogues some of the most important young adult fiction works like Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies. The article also claims that the 20th century is the pivotal point for young adult literature and includes the previously mentioned titles as the catalysts for the rise of young adult fiction in the mid-20th century. In this section, there is a bevy of sources that can back up this claim and evidence to support this claim, as seen with the first mainstream young adult novels in the 1950’s, to the 60s and 70s when young adult fiction became a true force in literary circles, to the 80s when authors began to cover controversial themes such as rape and suicide, and finally to today when young adult fiction has become a money-making force with titles such as Harry Potter and Twilight. If I were to add anything, it would to be that some sources would need to be improved, it even said so on the page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jfunchion ( talk • contribs) 14:45, 28 March 2018 (UTC)
Hi all, I just published the sections that I've been working on on the main wiki page. I am still taking a look at some of the sections (history, boundaries b/w) that I didn't look at previously to get them on the same level as the rest of the article. Kaylac8215 ( talk) 20:09, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
Is there some kind of contest amongst editors to see how many times Harry Potter can be mentioned in this article? Seriously. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 147.85.186.6 ( talk) 22:14, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
The statement "differences in genre styles between YA fiction and adult fiction" is cited by a single source behind a paywall and lacks a page reference. Also, "adult fiction" is poorly defined as 'adult' fiction can also refer to 'erotica'. This needs a better source or should be removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.89.104.23 ( talk) 00:45, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Kaylac8215.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 05:21, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
Young adult novels are primarily aimed at adolescents, so why is this type of novel bizarrely called young adult fiction? The article should state how this type of novel gained its misleading name. Why isn't it called adolescent fiction, teen fiction, high school fiction or coming-of-age fiction? I'm not suggesting the article's name be changed; I realise WP call it that because that's its common name - but why did it become called young adult fiction? Magazines aimed at adolescents aren't termed young adult magazines. Films aimed at an adolescent audience aren't called young adult films. No-one would describe their 15-year-old son/daughter/niece/nephew as a young adult - yet they'd likely buy them a novel that's described as young adult, knowing that it's designed for people their age. A teacher whose pupils are 15 wouldn't say that (s)he teaches young adults. Jim Michael ( talk) 11:04, 8 September 2017 (UTC)
Hi all! I will be working on this wiki for a class project. I will be doing basic copyediting and reformatting, as well as adding a section talking about Diversity in YA lit. If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave them down below. Kaylac8215 ( talk) 00:35, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
Over the past few weeks, I have been going through the current article and the talk page to figure out how I want to restructure this article. Right now, the structure of the article is very poor. Nothing flows properly and it's full of random subsections. I want to work on making these flow a little bit better. Here are some of my thoughts so far:
Ideas for Diversity in YA Lit section:
Kaylac8215 ( talk) 21:57, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
Here are some sources that I'm considering to use. I'm still compiling resources. Lack of Diversity:
Rise of Diversity:
Why Diversity is Important:
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Kaylac8215 ( talk • contribs) 01:37, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
Text and/or other creative content from Young adult fiction was copied or moved into Diversity in young adult fiction with this edit. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. |
A wikipedia article is not an appropriate place to push your diversity agenda. The diversity section is nearly a half of the article. Please summarize. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 147.85.172.6 ( talk) 20:54, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
Diversity is just one component of many recent trends in Young Adult literature, and framing it as a completely separate subdivision at its length and stated significant is an obvious case of undue weight and personal agenda. Try to mix the information into a more appropriate part of the article where it's more relevant and proportionate. 51.37.57.129 ( talk) 15:20, 1 January 2019 (UTC)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 January 2020 and 15 April 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Noelamb7.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 05:21, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
The Criticism section of this article has multiple issues. The only sources included are the works of one professor alongside miscellaneous opinion pieces, including one from questionable source Salon. None of the sources appear to indicate any consensus or provide any secondary coverage of these opinions. This section gives WP:UNDUE weight to individual ideas that don't meet notability standards beyond WP:FRINGE. As per WP:CRIT, this section appears to be counterproductive, and I propose its removal. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 00:28, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
Who defines consensus? If a few conservatives complained about YA fiction why does that merit being placed into the criticism section as representative of consensus but not criticisms from the left? What meets notability standards? Give me the exact number of citations needed for something to be classified as representative of consensus and thus notable as proper criticism. There is substantial criticism of commercial capitalist pop culture coming from the left that doesn't just focus upon its being non-diverse. It is a commercial consumerist phenomenon. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2405:6E00:31EE:9A00:E5B9:A204:EE38:A239 ( talk) 01:40, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
an author's analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources, the primary sources being the YA genre books. I don't think the Slate article is properly summarized, as the editor who added it fixated on Frey's scheme, which is just a minor blip in the YA world.Between us, we've collected a number of good sources, you're welcome to improve that section. And if a better section heading than "criticism" occurs to you, go for it. Schazjmd (talk) 21:51, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 August 2022 and 6 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Iwritesometimes ( article contribs). Peer reviewers: TheWarlock42.
— Assignment last updated by DarthVetter ( talk) 20:27, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
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on 14:57, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
Hello! For class I was asked to evaluate and article and provide feedback. This is my first time doing an article eval (or anything wiki related) so any feedback is welcome! I decided to specifically focus on the content of the article so here were some things that I had noticed:
Harry Potter is harmful? J.K. Rowling is harmful? Those are not facts. They are the opinions of some people. Zaslav ( talk) 00:56, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
I don't find this article highly reliable. It is misleading about the age of the YA genre, which dates back to the 1940's at least and was in libraries in the 1950's at latest despite the article's assertion that "booksellers and libraries began creating young adult sections" in the 1960's. The following parenthesis, "(although some had long existed)", is not enough to overcome the false impression that creation began in the 1960's. Hence I added a word to get "more booksellers and libraries began creating young adult sections". This may seem trivial but I've read in two recent newspaper articles that Judy Blue created YA fiction in 1960. (Yes, in both the New York Times and the Guardian.) Somehow, the history is getting muddied. Care is required. Zaslav ( talk) 01:05, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
A new problem: The article said: The Outsiders ", and was the first novel published specifically marketed for young adults"—I'm deleting this because it cannot be true. All Heinlein's juveniles in the 1950s must have been marketed to young adults because they were written for the YA/juvenile line, i.e., for teenage boys. I read the cited article "The Outsiders reinvented young adult fiction. Harry Potter made it inescapable." and it does not claim The Outsiders created the marketing genre. It only says "initially, The Outsiders was marketed to adults, and it flopped." Then, "It wasn’t until a few years later, when publishers saw that the vast majority of the book’s sales were coming from school libraries, that the book found its true market: teenagers." This is not at all about the YA genre. Zaslav ( talk) 22:52, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
The modern style of young-adult fiction originated during the 1960s, after the publication of S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967).. It is supported by the Vox article which says, about The Outsiders,
it would also help to create the publishing category of young adult fiction as we know it todayand The New Yorker which says
For Hinton, who almost single-handedly brought the Y.A. genre into being, this marks a kind of transgenerational full-circle return.Schazjmd (talk) 23:05, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
I listened to a recent CBC radio discussion that suggested that Judy Blume was an important writer of adolescent fiction. This was in reference to a documentary about her < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neWsO1Rk_q0>. I am, therefore, surprised that she isn't even mentioned in this article. Rwood128 ( talk) 12:51, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
Hi User:Danbloch Your recent edits were useful – they made me think further, and realise that I should have taken more care..
However, I was amazed to find no mention of Philip Pullman here! – as I was earlier with Judy Blume.
YA fiction is a sub-category of Children's literature and that article has a much fuller discussion of YA authors than this does. When I discovered this I wondered if it might be a good idea to merge these two articles and so avoid duplication and the wasting of editors' time?
The opening sentence of the lede is problematic: "Young adult fiction (YA) is a category of fiction written for readers from 12 to 18 years of age. [1] [2] Isn't it in fact a "category" created by librarians and publishers rather than writers? Though some writers obviously write for this "market". Rwood128 ( talk) 13:20, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
I realise it is hard being a librarian, especially in some parts of the world. Amazon says this about the second book of Le Guin's Earthsea series: "Teens, especially, will be inspired by the way Le Guin allows her characters to evolve and grow into their own powers". The book is also described as a fantasy classic and as read by many adults.
I find the idea of young adult fiction helping to provide a transition between child and adult literature a little odd (patronising?). I consumed 2 or 3 used adult SF paperback novels a week, in my early teens, and also read adult novels in my grandmother's bookcase, when I stayed with her. -- Rwood128 ( talk) 20:53, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
References
The recent trend in banning book for children parallels what happened in the first half of the twentieth century with Modernist novelists James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and others.Then the emphasis was on keeping women in the dark, as far as was possible, especially with regard to anything sexual. The topic of YA fiction and censorship is important and needs to be expanded. Rwood128 ( talk) 17:12, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
The criticisms in the section 21st century seem irrelevant to me. They do not have anything specifically to do with young adult fiction, and they could be raised about any genre of literature. Are these appropriate for this article?— Anita5192 ( talk) 17:22, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Young adult fiction's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.
Reference named "Time":
I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. Feel free to remove this comment after fixing the refs. AnomieBOT ⚡ 15:47, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
The section on the classroom states: "Students who read YA are more likely to appreciate literature and have stronger reading skills than others". So YA authors don't produce works of literature?!! Rwood128 ( talk) 22:58, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
This article needs to clarify what it means by young adult fiction. To this non-specialist, it seems to be (1) Fiction specifically written for contemporary teenagers that deals with the issues that they face growing up now. This includes works by Judy Blume and the Harry Potter series. (2) Any fiction where the subject matter is appropriate for teenage and whose protagonists are often teenagers. This would include so-called classic novels, like Alice in Wonderland, Tom Sawyer and The Catcher in the Rye. Classics appear also be defined in terms of length, ideas, sentence structure, vocabulary, and especiallt that they are set in a time and cuulture foreign to contemporary teenagers, as. for example, Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter. It also needs to be noted in the article that terms teenager and young adult are fairly recent inventions. -- Rwood128 ( talk) 12:17, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
Anita5192, this is rather vague – are you indicating that you find the sources I describe as looking "most interesting" unreliable? -- Rwood128 ( talk) 19:38, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
Dan Bloch I now better understand your objection to including The Lords of the Ring in this article, but if that isn't YA, numerous other works included here also aren't, especially fantasy? Would you agree that YA fiction began in 1967 and that this is a distinctly new genre from earlier teenage literature, and adult literature that children can enjoy? -- Rwood128 ( talk) 21:20, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
The success of Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly, published in 1942, is generally acknowledged as the impetus for romance novels specifically written for teenage girls, although Daly considered her novel to be written for adults. Young adult romance novels were referred to as junior novels and sometimes malt shop novels.Schazjmd (talk) 23:08, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
Just found: This definition, from the Young Adult Library Services Association, needs to be considered:
Also, the article does not mention this American context, or consider YA in any language other than English. -- Rwood128 ( talk) 11:37, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
Rwood128, the blockquote from Cart splitting off from a sentence fragment is awkward and unnecessary. It could easily be summarized without needing to quote it directly. Schazjmd (talk) 22:38, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
Rwood128 ( talk) 14:38, 18 May 2023 (UTC) -- Rwood128 ( talk) 18:01, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
A quick search of the Times Literary Supplement suggests that the term YA was not (or rarely) used in the UK, at least in the 1960s-80s, but rather "teeenage", "junior", adolescent". -- Rwood128 ( talk) 18:01, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
References
Dan Bloch, Perhaps I'm just being picky but I find this section, inadequate and poorly written. I thought my objections were clear enough. Anyhow, when I can find the time, I'll work on improving this section.
Can something be done about the narrow focus of this article on American YA literature? Rwood128 ( talk) 15:42, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
In an edit today I removed the sentence However, "'young adult literature' is inherently amorphous",
[1] and "even those who study and teach it have not reached a consensus on a definition".
[2]
. These quotes are pretty good, but there are issues with using them this way. Usage like this appears awkward and is non-encyclopaedic. Sources should almost be paraphrased, not quoted directly. Something like "Young adult literature is hard to define, even by those who study it and teach it" would be fine. But when the quotes appear like this, the claim is being made in Wikipedia's voice. In order to be acceptable the author would have to to be specified inline too, e.g., "Young adult literature is hard to define ("inherently amorphous", in the words of Michael Cart)."
Note that the {{cite}}
templates have a handy quote=
parameter which lets you insert quotes in a citation without having to go through gymnastics like the above.
See Wikipedia:Quotations for more discussion about using quotes. Dan Bloch ( talk) 17:04, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
References