I’m not finished yet: Intergenerational Maturation in YA Literature

 

‘Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child – What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.’

-           Michelle Obama, Preface to Becoming (2018, Preface)

 

Discourses of adolescence are in a state of flux. In real world terms, puberty now begins earlier, representing a period of growth that it is increasingly understood as extending into one’s early twenties. This deferral of adulthood as a biological category is echoed by a deferral of adulthood as a social category, as the milestones through which its attainment has conventionally been understood – financial independence, marriage, home ownership, parenthood etc. – are themselves also increasingly deferred. These important changes are influenced by social constructions of the notions of adolescence and maturity. In turn, these changing ideas are reflected in literary constructions, shaped by them and can even been seen to stabilise social constructions of an idea, but when the notions of maturation are becoming more fluid what happens to literary representations of these concepts?

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Intergenerational maturation is a term I propose to employ as maturation though interactions with other generations. These interactions can take place in a number of ways, but most importantly when they occur intergenerational personal development takes place due to kinship or truths shared. My research introduces this term and discusses why ‘coming of age’ is inadequate to not only the needs of young readers but to culture as a whole in the face of the problems society as a whole is grappling with in the current cultural climate. 

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Current research dedicated to the study of adolescent fiction tends to construct adolescence as a transition between the lost harbour of childhood and the unknown shores of adulthood; a phase with a designated end point. As Michelle Obama observes above, as if this process is finite.  My research seeks to complicate such understandings by approaching maturation as a process that unfolds throughout a lifetime, and to explore the extent to which this view of adolescence is represented in contemporary YA fiction, and specifically how maturation is represented in Patrick Ness’s work but with consideration of the wider field of YA as a whole.