Young Adult or YA Literature is typically that which is specifically geared towards an adolescent audience and often centers on teenage main characters. Julia Stamper (2012), however, calls it a “confusing term”, defining young adult literature to be novels aimed at the demographic of 12-18, but that which has often included preteen ages of 10 and 11. The term “literature” has also been redefined to include works of non-fiction and poetry and even visual content like comics and graphic novels. Additionally, Stamper highlights that many have argued for the upper age limit of young adult literature to be extended to 30 or even 35 since these books often appeal to audiences well beyond their teenage years (ibid.).

YA books are mainly dedicated to “the teenage experience” (Kokesh & Sternadori, 2015, p. 139), often serving as a blanket term to include a vast array of genres. From romance to paranormal fiction, these tales deal with issues important to adolescents such as underage drinking, eating disorders, parental abandonment, peer popularity, and, of course, the age-old question, “Just who am I?” Most young adult fiction also seems to be geared at female audiences (along with being overwhelmingly written by women), reflecting the fact that young girls tend to be more prolific readers than young boys across cultures (Chiu & McBride-Chang, 2006).

Although YA literature can be described as hanging “precariously low from the lowest rung of the literary ladder”, they are “often the first ones that reluctant readers enjoy reading”. This is why it is important to study the genre’s narratives and the effects they might have on young readers and specifically on girls, considering the genre’s “overwhelmingly female imprint” (Kokesh & Sternadori, 2015, p. 140).

Adolescence is a liminal phase, marked by a transition between childhood and adulthood. Psychologist Jean Piaget states that the change from “concrete operations” to “formal operational thought” at this stage means that the finding of one’s self becomes particularly significant at this juncture. This search for identity may often be one of ambivalence and confusion, and this is perhaps the reason why popular culture becomes particularly important as teenagers look wherever they can for models of behaviour and acceptance (Stone & Church,1968). Kokesh and Sternadori delineate three major ways in which young adult readers engage with YA literature: identification, parasocial relations, and perceived realism. Identification is a mechanism through which audience members experience reception and interpretation of the text from the inside as if the events were happening to them, and this is one of the main mechanisms through which people develop their social attitudes and construct their identities. Perceived realism is when characters and situations, though fictional, appear to be realistic and relatable. In a parasocial relationship, readers use media to gain a one-sided, but “intimate, friend-like” relationship with a desired media character.

In 2016, as part of my larger dissertation on YA literature and identity formation as an undergraduate Sociology student at St Xavier’s College, Kolkata, I conducted in-depth interviews with 25 respondents (both male and female) between the ages of 15-30, in Kolkata, India. The purpose was to understand, through a series of questions, whether the phenomena of identification, para-social relations, and perceived realism could be recognized among self-proclaimed readers of YA fiction in Kolkata, India.

A majority of my respondents said that they read “to escape”, or as a break from the real world. For one 19-year-old female respondent, YA books were her only way to cope after her older sister died in a car accident when she was 14. Another female respondent, also 19, said that because she did not have a lot of friends growing up, books have always been her “friends”. Several said that they read young adult books in English because they give them a taste of new places and cultures since they are mostly based outside India.

Identification

According to the study, young readers tend to find the characters or their experiences in YA books extremely relatable, despite them being based in fictional and often fantastic worlds. Even in magical worlds like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson, supernatural ones like Lord of the Rings or Twilight, or dystopian, futuristic settings like The Hunger Games or Divergent, the protagonists are usually around the same age as the readers. They go through certain similar experiences like similar school lives, friendships, first romantic encounters, and so on. Young people, while reading other young people, seem to feel a more profound impact than those reading characters of other ages. Many young readers tend to consider characters from young adult books to be their role models and consciously try to emulate their characteristics. A majority of my respondents agreed that reading young adult literature in their formative years has shaped some aspects of their identities. For instance, one 22-year-old male respondent (who claimed to read comics more than novels) claimed that Peter Parker (“Spiderman”)’s compassion and easy wit has shaped him to be the person he is today. “I think he taught me compassion, and I have found myself trying to emulate his wit and sarcasm often. I’m quite certain I would be a different person if I had never read the Spiderman comics or superhero comics in general”.

Perceived Realism

Readers interviewed testified to finding YA books realistic, even if the characters are fictional and sometimes have surreal magical experiences. As one respondent stated, “At heart, they are teenagers like us”. For more than half the respondents, an incident they read about in a book has affected how they saw an incident in their own lives. This can be a negative experience too: a 21-year-old female respondent said that the body-image issues of the protagonist from Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries series exacerbated her body-image concerns so much that she had to stop reading them.

Parasocial Relations

The study revealed evidence of parasocial relations that readers of young adult literature form with characters in these books. They can develop strong feelings of affection or hatred towards a character, to the extent that the characters’ victories or losses seem like their own victories or losses. They tend to feel significant emotional distress if a beloved character dies. They also develop crushes, and at times, perceived romantic relationships with characters, and often use relationships in books as a standard to construct their romantic selves and perform their romantic relationships. Finally, many readers assert to inserting themselves into the narratives they read, consciously or subconsciously pretending to be one of the characters, or simply seeing themselves as a character in the fictional world.

Three of my respondents spoke at length about elaborate constructions they had imagined while reading certain young adult books, about themselves or modified versions of themselves as characters in these books. One 21-year-old female respondent said, for instance, that she has spent hours of her teenage life daydreaming and “playacting” herself as a character in the Harry Potter series. The character was important to the plot and had relationships with the other characters. “The character I imagined myself to be was a lot like who I am. We had similar personality traits, and we spoke in the same way. But she was different. She was white, she was attractive, and she was braver. She took risks that I would never dare to take in real life.” She says that there was a time when her imagination became so realistic that she felt like she was living through the character. It became a source of comfort, an even greater escape than just reading the books. “I never told anyone at the time because I was worried people would think I was crazy,” she said.

Finally, all of my older respondents (21-30) agreed that there was a difference in how they engaged with these characters at different ages. As they got older, they tended to see nuances in the plot and characterization that they had missed before. They began to see them as “greyer and less black and white”.

The findings of my research led to the conclusion that young readers can often personally identify with the books that are aimed at their (the “young adult”) demographic. They may use books, specifically young adult books to momentarily escape from difficult, uncomfortable, or traumatic real-life situations. There is evidence of parasocial relationships and emotional attachments that readers develop with young adult books or their characters. Almost all of my respondents agreed that in spite of young adult fiction being based in fictional and often fantastic worlds, the characters or their experiences seemed realistic and relatable to them.

Social psychological scholars have concluded that emotion has an important role to play in identity construction: Gilbert (2002) for instance, suggests that each of our life experiences shapes a story in our minds, and it is from this blueprint of narratives that we learn to interact as individuals by applying familiar behaviours to unfamiliar encounters that constantly arise in the future. For young readers, the fictional characters that they read often become the scripts based on which they develop self-constructs and self-perceptions. They consciously emulate their actions and see them as “significant others” that they use to socialize with and make sense of the world around them. For consumers of popular culture, therefore, the texts they consume become an integral resource in the construction and performance of their identities.

References:

Chiu, M.M., &McBride-Chang, C. (2006). Gender, context, and reading: A comparison of students in 43 countries. Scientific Studies of Reading 10(4),331–362. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr1004_1

Gilbert, K. R. (2002). Taking a Narrative Approach to Grief Studies: Finding meaning in stories. Death Studies 26(3), 223-39. DOI: 10.1080/07481180211274

Kokesh, J., & Sternadori, M. (2015). The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A Qualitative Study of How Young Adult Fiction Affects Identity Construction. Atlantic Journal of Communication. 23(3), 139-158. DOI: 10.1080/15456870.2015.1013104)

Stamper, J. (2012). Female Characters as Role Models in Young Adult Literature. Chancellor’s Honor Program Projects. University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Retrieved from https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2543&context=utk_chanhonoproj

Stone, J., & Church, J. (1968). Childhood and Adolescence. New York: Random House.

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Kausumi Saha is a feminist researcher, writer, and editor. She currently works at Gender at Work and has a Master’s degree in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. You can find more on her work here.