Why is young adult romance now being written primarily in the first person?

Question

My recollection is that when I started reading romance novels in the 1980s, the majority (perhaps 60%) were written in the third person. This included some "young adult" romances with characters in their early 20s.I stopped reading them until recently. "Nowadays," it seems that the vast majority of young adult romances (80%-plus) are written in the first person.Why might that be the case for young adult romances, and is it "less true" for stories of "older" people?

Answer 1

I believe this shift has occurred largely due to the fact that first person narration often helps "hook" a reader into a novel faster than a 3rd person narration. The reader is placed directly in the shoes of the character from a first person narration view, rather than "listening" from a 3rd person omniscient narrator. To many, 1st person narration becomes more genuine than 3rd.

In addition, we see a shift in societal priorities over literature's history. When the traditional sense of romantic literature developed in the 19th century, it was most often a third person narrator, focused not only on the protagonist, but on the social contracts and climate of the time. Cultural involvements have since shifted to focus more on the ego and the individual, thus being reflected in our modern literature.