YA fiction is a marketing category, not a narrative genre

Evidence

Young adult, or YA fiction, and its middle-grade subset, are not really genres but a marketing tool of publishers capitalizing on the success of series like Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter—and hoping to foster the reading habit in technologically inclined generations. YA books have always been written but not called that: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, to name but a few classics. — Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition, 491

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how a publisher-driven shelf category retroactively absorbed earlier classics and reshaped contemporary children’s literature.