According to ALA's Printz Award Criteria, QUALITY goes beyond audience size, popularity, message, and controversy. They call the main criteria LITERARY EXCELLANCE. The literary devices that they focus on for the award include: story, voice, style, setting, accuracy, characters, theme, illustration, and book design.
For me it boils down to that "je-ne-sais-quoi" that makes a book unforgettable and touches something human deep down in each of us: a book or other literary piece that makes us think about the world and our own lives in a new or deeper way.
I appreciate the introspective-life enhancement that you associate with literary quality, Shannon. Is literary quality like beauty then and seen through the "eye of the beholder"? How can we agree on what literary quality is if responses are so personal?
ReplyDeleteWe can take the ephemeral aspect of literary quality and give it labels the same way we have labeled "literary devices" in our writing.
ReplyDeleteWiki has a great basis for what is literature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature#Literary_techniques
And, from there, we can move on to aspects of high quality literature, including morals learned, characters that are representative but interesting, and plots that are entertaining but also believable in the context of the book.