Protagonista Jove awards, a non-academic literary canon

Abstract

This article examines the narrative model of the publications aspiring to the Protagonista Jove literary awards during the period 2010-2020. There are points of agreement and disagreement between the corpus of prize-winning books selected in advance by a specially created commission of experts and the books that were voted for by a popular jury, composed exclusively of teenage readers aged 13-14 and 15-16. This comparison is an attempt to elucidate the background of the target readers forming the jury in this competition with a view to the constitution of a hypothetical non-academic youth literary canon on the basis of a multifactorial list of indicators: theme, plot, time, space, archetypes, etc. The results are obtained by comparing the usual discourse parameters of the stories presented by the candidates with those of the winners. The size of this paradigmatic literary award in Catalan makes it possible to establish solid indications of traceability involving a canon removed from academic criteria, given the disparity of opinions between the specialist mediators and other readers.