Is YA Literary? The Search for an Abundant Canon

So a thing happened, as folks today like to say, deliberately understating the bigness of said thing.

And as part of my work these last two years at Vermont College Fine Arts’ program in Writing for Children and Young Adults—besides writing one and a half young adult novels, a short story, two picture books, and a sixteenth of a middle-grade verse novel—I wrote a critical thesis.

This thesis joined two passions—young adult literature and literary analysis—while allowing me to advocate for more young adult literature in the canon. Why can’t we have an abundant canon with diverse, robust definitions of literary that represent a range of cultural lenses? How do we teach “traditional” literary analysis using young adult texts?

Here ’tis. Enjoy!

Is YA Literary? The Search for an Abundant Canon

Use of this document: Please share as needed when making a rationale to schools for the use of YA literature as canon in the classroom. You may reference this thesis in blog posts, board meetings, seminars, professional development, workshops, or other such venues if credit is given to Lyn Fairchild Hawks as author, and a link back to my site, lynhawks.com, is included.