Literary Vampires - Genre Snobbery and YA

By Katherine Dunn

Like Leena, I've just come back from the London Book Fair, which was a fun if exhausting experience. As LBF is a primarily an event for industry insiders, rather than the casual browser, I spent most of my time in the programme of seminars. Leena' has already blogged here about the seminar we attended on New Adult, so today I thought I'd talk about the other seminar that really stuck in my mind: Reading Outside the Box (with Matt Haig and Chris Priestly).

The seminar intended to discuss whether YA is beginning to see the break down of genre boundaries. This is a topic close to my heart – I love genre, and am sick of having to preface any book recommendation with “I know it's fantasy but...”. We hat Matt Haig (Shadow Forest, The Radleys) and Christ Priestly (Tales of Terror) on the panel, both writers of YA and genre fiction. The general consensus from the two was that in YA genre snobbery is a thing of the past. While on first thought this might seem to be true, in regards to mega-hits like The Hunger Games or Twilight. However, a few important points came up in the discussion, namely that YA/Children's literature is already treated as a genre in and of itself. In the bookshop, YA and Children's literature isn't split by genre (except in some larger bookshops where Dark Romance stands alone), it's split by target age and within that you'll find comedy along side horror along side Carnegie Award winning literary fiction. The panel cited this as an example of genre being as accepted as literary fiction, where genre snobbery starts to break down. But I would argue that if YA/Children's is already split off into a lumped together genre, then it has already been relegated to looked down upon “genre” status. If you take my disclaimer above, and swap fantasy for YA, how many of us have had to start a book recommendation with “I know it's YA but...”?

Maybe YA is where we'll see the start of the breakdown of genre snobbery, but I don't think we're there yet. As the panel pointed out, the Carnegie Award short list and the bestseller list rarely have a great deal of crossover. Though The Hunger Games might have made millions, and carry a message about self-determination, revolution and the media-centric world, the subtext is going to get a lot less press than the violence, dystopia and horror aspects.

Not every genre hit has to carry a secret literary subtext, nor does every literary novel have to contain clear genre elements for the snobbery to be broken down; we need to start by acknowledging the unspoken thing we all know about publishing. Genre is as much a marketing tool as a useful way of classifying types of fiction. And the marketing beast can often lumber in and create artificial boundaries between books. Breaking down genre snobbery means acknowledging this, and then happily walking into a bookshop and ignoring it. And maybe YA, with its propensity for cross-genre hits and open-minded audience is a good place to start.