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Post by moseymoo on Aug 27, 2014 15:46:11 GMT -5
I think my experience of the canon is pretty similar to your description of tradition (or Tradition with a capital T, if you like). I don't necessarily agree with the concept, as it is, by its very definition, elitist and in the past has been known to exclude the works of some literary greats (notably Shelly) simply because they were "out of fashion". However, I do believe that it does exist -- at least in some sort of intangible yet referencable state -- in the same way that your concept of literary tradition exists.
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Post by Dante on Aug 30, 2014 12:24:24 GMT -5
In the discussions both of the Canon and of the dividing line between Children's/YA, I think a truth emerges that there can be no hard and fast boundaries. The idea of a mystical set of Supreme Texts which are of such stunning influence that all other fiction contemporary and since leans upon and responds to them is comical, as proven by the fact that there is, of course, no agreement upon what exactly constitutes the Canon. I challenge anyone to show me the author - or reader - who provably has read either every work ever considered "Canonical" or every second-order work responding directly to a Canonical work before embarking upon their own literary projects. Influence is far more disorderly than that, and certainly far less traceable; with the exception of a few, always personal and subjective works of extreme influence, all influence from any novel, Canonical or otherwise, simply dissolves into a vast body of background noise to one's reading. You can argue that every work is a tissue of everything the writer had ever read; that may even be true, but it's a meaningless statement as each individual voice will by and large have dwindled into untrackability. Try and infer every single influence upon any work, and you will fail. The only capital-C Canon that can exist can only be a personal one, a library of personal reference, and much of that will be half-forgotten, too. The idea of a Canon itself implies the potential for originality, anyway.
As for YA, it reflects, I think, two things: One is that it's awfully hard to come up with a good name for "fiction for teenagers." They certainly aren't likely to want to be seen in the Children's section, no matter what the actual level of any children's text - and they all have multiple. That's the second thing; to be honest, I think the idea of age boundaries is mostly a nonsense; after all, adults wrote, edited, illustrated, published nearly all of them! Clearly adults are therefore enjoying books for readers of any age, on some level. For the most part, the only remotely strong link between books of any individual age category I've ever noticed is simply the age of the protagonist. By and large, a book with an adult protagonist is for adults, with a child protagonist is for children, etc., etc. But that's often an incredibly poor indicator. David Eddings's The Belgariad series was once, I'm pretty sure, for adults, but now it's marketed as young adult, which owes something largely to the fact that children's and young adult reading have boomed in the post-Potter years. It sounds like some other texts mentioned in this thread are similar. I think I would go further and state that, if you simply replaced the protagonist with an older or younger character, that would be enough to change the projected age range of any book you'd care to name. Personally, I read basically only young adult fiction these days, verging into children's. The books I choose generally have all the depth and complexity attributed to adult fiction - and, in my experience, a lot more fun, too. Quite aside from the depth question, what on Earth is wrong with reading for fun, either? There's talk of Harry Potter as a "crossover title," the age boundaries being the thing crossed over, but the truth is just that it was popular enough that adults felt justified in reading it and couldn't hide that they were reading it. All works of fiction are potential crossover titles.
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Antenora
Detriment Deleter
Fiendish Philologist
Put down that harpoon gun, in the name of these wonderful birds!
Posts: 15,891
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Post by Antenora on Aug 30, 2014 14:30:35 GMT -5
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Post by A comet crashing into Earth on Sept 4, 2014 16:31:32 GMT -5
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