Formative Young Adult Literature: Negotiating the Terms of Reading

Abstract:Joshua Landy says "formative fictions" help us fine-tune our mental capacities. This article looks at how novels for young adults may challenge readers to fine-tune their capacities as readers of more complex fiction. Three sample titles (I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, The Tricksters by Margaret Mahy, and Slay by Brittney Morris) make use of character-authors to invite readers to negotiate the terms of reading. Young readers normally have extensive childhood experience in the social negotiation of the terms of make-believe games ("You be the daddy") and can apply this expertise to the challenge of these novels as they interact with the explicit observations of the heroines about the making of stories. This article takes up Aidan Chambers' challenge to analyze materials for youth as a separate literature. By exploring the work of three novels published over a 70-year span, (the titles were published in 1948, 1986, and 2019), it meets his demand to include the history of youth literature in our considerations. In these sample texts, young readers are invited to turn back to early childhood in order to make use of the skills and experience of fictional engagement as first developed in pretend games; as a consequence, they develop more subtle capacities as interpreters of complex fiction, thus addressing a major challenge of what Chambers calls "the age between."