Abandoning the harsh moralism of his source, Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet, which presented the story as an awful warning against “the lusts of wanton flesh”, Shakespeare made his lovers sympathetic and heroic figures whose tragic deaths have the potential to redeem their world.įor obvious reasons, Romeo and Juliet has always been popular with young audiences. YA, as its aficionados matily abbreviate it, is a fairly recent genre, introduced by publishers and booksellers in the 1960s to cater to the rising teenage market SE Hinton’s The Outsiders is sometimes called the first YA novel, others trace the origin of the genre back to The Catcher in the Rye.īut Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the mid 1590s (apart from being a play rather than a novel) has the germ of the genre: a story with teenage protagonists, their passion and idealism pitted against a corrupt and dystopian adult society. You could make a case that Shakespeare, on top of all his other literary innovations, was the inventor of young adult fiction. Geoff Miles, a senior lecturer in Shakespeare and YA, reviews New Zealand writer Chloe Gong’s bestselling duology These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends.
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