{"id":258,"date":"2014-09-22T19:03:27","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T23:03:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/?p=258"},"modified":"2014-09-22T19:03:27","modified_gmt":"2014-09-22T23:03:27","slug":"new-cancer-new-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/2014\/09\/22\/new-cancer-new-me\/","title":{"rendered":"New Cancer, New Me."},"content":{"rendered":"

In a 2009 article “What’s Happening in YA Literature? Trends in Books for Adolescents,” Melanie Koss and William Teale identified current trends within the Young Adult genre of literature. One of the more significant points that they identified pertains to a shift in subject matter throughout the bulk of the genre. The authors explained, “Traditionally, YA books have been identified as ‘problem novels’, novels with social issues that affect teens- and coming-of-age novels” . In the past it was common for Young Adult story lines to follow the coming-of-age structure where the protagonist must deal with a single transforming event and other social issues along the way, but within the more recent Young Adult literature there has been a considerable shift in focus towards teens simply struggling to find themselves. This type of structure differs from the coming-of-age tradition in that the main character tends to struggle with the many problems of every day life, rather than a single, momentous occasion. The authors cited a statistic from their study on these trends: “an overwhelming majority of the books (85%) focused on teens finding themselves.” While a shocking figure when applied to the entire corpus of a genre, the statistic, 85% of books, may hold a little less gravity when one considers the nature of the young adult genre. In fact it is hard to imagine a book being classified as “Young Adult” if it did not address the typical teenage question of identity. For example, John Green’s popular Young Adult novel,\u00a0The Fault in our Stars<\/em>, is widely known for its tragically morbid subject matter. It deals with several teens, all diagnosed with cancer (and mostly terminal), who must learn to cope with their severe illnesses. It is hard to imagine a successful Young Adult novel with such serious issues that does not diffuse the tension with the humor involved in growing up in a teenage world. In this way, while the trend in story structure that the article identifies is a little obvious within the realm of young adult novels, it is perhaps a little more relevant on the larger literary scale.<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Green, John. The Fault in Our Stars. New York: Penguin, 2014. Print.<\/p>\n

Melanie D. Koss and William H. Teale.\u00a0Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Vol. 52, No. 7 (Apr., 2009), pp. 563-572<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a 2009 article “What’s Happening in YA Literature? Trends in Books for Adolescents,” Melanie Koss and William Teale identified current trends within the Young Adult genre of literature. One of the more significant points that they identified pertains to a shift in subject matter…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":881,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/881"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":266,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions\/266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}