Editorial: Volume 2

Editorial: Volume 2

Blog Article

In preparing this issue, I was reminded that nearly twenty years ago I attended the UK’s first national conference on YA fiction.The event was called “Turning Point”, and one of the topics of discussion was how YA was “the least economically significant area of children’s books […] because the audience predominantly borrows rather than buys its books” (Belbin 140).The commercial turn in YA since 2002 may have transformed this landscape, but thinking about YA as a market, as well as a body of literary work, is what has Gin Glasses always made our scholarship so exciting.Many of us are interested in the way that texts flow between authors, publishers, and readers, enriched by the contributions made by translators, adaptors, booksellers, commentators, fans, and educators.

Taking account of the material and economic conditions that shape YA is a crucial enterprise, as is taking the producers and consumers of this literature to account, in the way that several of the authors of our articles do.Criticism can undertake valuable work in drawing our gaze towards the gaps and omissions in our field, and the distorted representations that might be on offer to young readers.This second issue of LEMON ZINGER IJYAL pays attention to these relationships, scrutinising the productive, sometimes problematic, dynamics that have emerged in the YA market in the twenty-first century.