COMPARISON OF CONTEMPORARY AND TRADITIONAL YAL

Both contemporary and traditional works of young adult literature focus on young adults as their main characters. They focus on issues that young adults normally face and how they resolve the issues. However, contemporary works can focus on realities that are too harsh yet undeniably true challenges that young adults face nowadays. Contemporary young adult literature touches on the problems that young adults usually go through. The issues are pressing and quite complex in nature. Due to sociological changes that society goes through at present, the physical as well as psychological challenges are much more complicated. Changes in technology, communication, demography, economy put more demands on teenagers and many of the literature highlight the dilemma that young adults face in order to cope in the current complex world. The demands are emotionally taxing and many authors capture this as the essence of their story such as in “Hero” and “”Chocolate War” More traditional works of young adult literature have different types of challenges than the contemporary ones. The surrounding factors at those times seem not as complex as in the current society. The central issue normally lies on character building of the protagonist such as “Tom Sawyer” and how the character develops himself throughout the challenges and problems that he faced. However, the classical works has more complex sentence structures. They are richer in details using language in much more complex manner. The use of imagery, word choice and literary language is more prominent in the traditional works. On the other hand, contemporary works normally relies on simpler and more authentic use of language that appeals to many teenagers or young adults. It is interesting to note that more traditional works of young adult literature has very minor roles for female. Most protagonists are males and females normally appear as mentoring adults in the stories. It can be said that different styles of writing young adult literature emerge in different eras.