Jane Austen invented #RealisticYA fiction

The Twitter trend for very ordinary retellings of fantastic stories revives a style that dates back to Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen would have been very proud of young adult fiction readers this week. Using the #RealisticYA and #VeryRealisticYA hashtags, many have been lining up to puncture the genre’s often fantastical plots with fragments of narrative in a rather more ordinary key. For instance, @corpsehands wrote “a teen finds out there are werewolves at the school. they’d investigate, but they have a LOT of homework to do.”

Such miniature parodies of dystopian sagas and supernatural romances, filling Twitter with ordinary girls and boys forswearing epic quests and magical initiations to get on with revision or household chores, continue a tradition that dates back to Northanger Abbey – and beyond.

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