What Was the First YA Novel?

Things are ah-brewing and ah-hopping on the child_lit listserv this week! And though my blog is primarily a conduit through which one learns about children’s book news, I couldn’t help but get utterly fascinated by a discussion of origin. Particularly, the origin of the YA novel.

Fun with semantics! So what do we mean when we say that something is a YA novel? Couldn’t you say that any novel read voraciously by teens (during the dawn of a book’s publication) is YA? So wouldn’t that mean that c...