Posts in category: Genre

I have a review essay out in the new issue of American Literary History, under the title “Genre Fiction without Shame.” It’s a longish discussion of Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less and Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher’s Genre Worlds, ornamented with my Strong Opinions™ about the study of popular genre. The journal permits authors to share an initially submitted version. Bonus features of the latter include a few embarrassing imprecisions in quotation and a far superior choice of typeface; for more precision and worse typography, refer to the published version.

From the essay:

Is literary studies on the verge of a genre turn of its own? When so eminent a literary historian as Mark McGurl argues that “genre fiction is the heart of the matter of literature” (xviii) in the present era, it might seem so. McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021) maps out a wide range of fiction subgenres, placing them at the center of contemporary fiction. Working in a different vein, Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher illuminate the social dynamics of genre-fiction production in their collective monograph Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First-Century Book Culture (2022). Yet, like the genre turn in literary fiction, this recent genre-fiction scholarship evinces a reified understanding of its subject. McGurl relies on high-literary assumptions about genre, even as he deflates the pretensions of literary fiction; Wilkins et al., writing as insiders, take the cohesiveness and autonomy of their “genre worlds” for granted. These contrasting limitations are both, it seems to me, responses to genre fiction’s status in the literary field. Without a fuller analysis of how that status is produced, work on genre fiction misses major aspects of the phenomenon, especially the contingency of genre categories and the variability of reader response.

Despite the Strong Opinions™, mainly I pay tribute to the new ground opened up by these two books for systematic studies of genre fiction in the full complexity of its social existence. Now if only I can get my own contribution done before the study of literary institutions becomes purely archaeological.

I have an article out in the new issue of Book History, modestly titled “Origins of the US Genre-Fiction System, 1890–1956.” By kind permission of the publisher I can also share the accepted manuscript version, which is both open access and richer in typographical errors.

This is the first published piece of my current book project on the history of genre fiction. In the article I attempt to trace the formation of an institutionalized system of genre categories in American publishing. Here’s the abstract, with a few more reflections after the jump:

Though genre fiction is now ubiquitous, and though both book history and literary studies have devoted considerable attention to individual genres like science fiction and romance novels, the history of the system of popular fiction categories has been little studied. This essay traces the origins of the genre-fiction system in United States magazine and book publishing, bringing sociological and book-historical analysis to bear on changing practices of categorization in publishing, advertising, librarianship, and reader response from the 1890s through the 1950s. Genre categories were only intermittently in use through the 1910s; they were first institutionalized in pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. The genre-fiction system was transmitted to book publishing only in the course of the so-called “paperback revolution” of the 1940s and 1950s, which made room for fiction-book production by categories while relegating it to a permanently low-status position. This transmission across publishing formats was far from deliberate; instead, the essay argues, the system of genre fiction arose and endured as a stable compromise articulating an expanded fiction-reading public to an expansive print culture industry, making new readers and new fiction—and new kinds of fiction—regularly available to each other in an enduringly hierarchized field.

Yesterday I had the privilege of responding to a wonderful talk by Matt Rubery at the Rutgers Initiative for the Book on “Podcasts, Audiobooks, and Podiobooks.” Feeling out of my depth as a non-podcast-listener, I went to my happy place instead, using my response as an occasion for digging around in a period and a medium I know better. Thinking about entanglements of print and audio fiction, I was moved to learn a little bit more about…

(Image from Galactic Central.) I’m not sure bringing this up was particularly illuminating on the subject of podcasts and books, but it was fun for me and I thought I’d set down a couple of things it made me think about.

I recently picked up the first of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels, Faceless Killers. I loved the Kenneth Branagh TV adaptations of these mysteries but had been saving up the pleasure of the novels themselves. I have the special talent of forgetting the resolution of pretty much any mystery I read, so I have no trouble enjoying the suspense a second time around. What I do not enjoy, however, is reading an excellent novel in a poor text.

I don’t think any writer did more to form me than Terry Pratchett. That might be a bit of a dangerous thing for a professional literary scholar to say. It would be easier to recount how much Ulysses, say, meant to a budding adolescent highbrow. In fact, though, I suspect that as a teenager, and not only as a teenager, I had a Pratchettian reading of the novel: Joyce’s Dublin as Ankh-Morpork, puns and pastiche as the engine driving the narrative language forward, the library of culture as an interdimensional transit zone, and no icon left unsmashed. In any case, I’m certain I would be a very different person if my elementary-school librarian hadn’t read Truckers to us and started me on a Pratchett kick that never stopped.