(urth) PF as YA
JBarach at aol.com
JBarach at aol.com
Wed Apr 15 15:15:43 PDT 2009
Jon writes:
> For those of you who suggested that Pirate Freedom
> was a YA novel, does your definition of that genre
> include an element of didacticism?
I'm baffled. Why should a YA novel include "an element of didacticism"?
Some YA novels have that, I suppose, but hardly all of them. Read, for
instance, Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief (and sequels). Or, going a bit
older, John Bellairs' novels, which are entirely fun and not at all didactic.
I don't know if you'd say there's a didactic element in, for instance, N.
D. Wilson's recent 100 Cupboards and its sequel Dandelion Fire.
If you find a didactic element in these novels, I suppose you could make
just as good a case for saying that adult novels include "an element of
didacticism." In fact, it would be easy to make that case for Flannery
O'Connor or Walker Percy or G. K. Chesterton or C. S. Lewis. Or Gene Wolfe, whose
books frequently (and especially recently) seem designed to teach wisdom
and spur the reader (as well as the characters) toward maturity. That's
something you see pretty strongly in Short Sun and Wizard Knight, for
instance, the latter of which especially is about a boy becoming a man and a man
becoming a true knight.
John
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