Posts in category: Research

This coming Thursday, February 12 at 6 p.m., I am discussing some work from my book in progress on genre fiction with the Culture Workshop of the NYU Sociology department. Clayton Childress of UBC and Under the Cover will be the discussant. I have precirculated a manuscript excerpt under the title “Yank Mags, Mushrooms, and Failed Isomorphisms: British Genre Fiction before 1970 and the Transmission of Classifications in Commercial Publishing.”

Perhaps “failed isomorphism” is an inauspicious rubric for an attempt at interdisciplinary scholarship, but there I go anyway. In this part of the book, I describe the surprising divergences between British and American genre-fiction history in the first half of the twentieth century, in order to explain why the UK, the country with the more robust popular fiction industry at the start of the century, lagged behind the US in developing genre fiction as a formal system of categories.

I’m presenting at this year’s conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing at the University of Reading. My talk is a first stab at a British-focused counterpart to my work on US genre fiction’s origins:

Yank Mags and Mushrooms: Genre Fiction in mid-century Britain

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.

This past Tuesday, at the kind invitation of Wen Xin, I gave a talk at the University of Kansas, under the title “Data Is a Sandwich: Lessons from the Computational Literary Field.” My slides (PDF) might only be of use for pictures of the titular sandwich, but they do also contain R code for reproducing my figures demonstrating some of the lessons I taught out of my dataculture package of cultural data in last year’s Data and Culture course. The talk itself was a bit of a retrospective on different things I’ve tried to do in literary data analysis since I first started dabbling some 14 years ago (!?!), with gestures towards what I think are the lessons I learned about how useful data gets made and turned into evidence for meaningful scholarly arguments.

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 have an extended review of John Thompson’s new study of publishing, Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing, forthcoming in Contemporary Literature. Tempting as it is to publish an adaptation of my review as a cozy historical mystery novel on Kindle Unlimited, I prefer to keep adding to my personal weblog like it’s 2009. The journal kindly permits authors to share accepted manuscripts, so here it is: behold the digital revolution in publishing! The final edited version will appear in Contemporary Literature 62, no. 3 (Fall 2022). Spoilers: I liked the book and think that literary scholars should read the work of this eminent sociologist. Also spoilers: the digital revolution in publishing does not consist of putting LaTeX’d PDFs on your website.

Update: added the link to the published version.

Back to Stevens:

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Next Wednesday, the yearlong seminar on classification which I am co-organizing at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis is hosting a one-day symposium on “Data, Classification, and Everyday Life.” We have three exciting guests and a plan to take over the world.

About a decade ago—painful words to type—I started working on an empirical study of the bibliography of scholarship on modernism. I intended it to be a quick side-project, maybe a piece of an essay or a book introduction, that would bolster my theoretical argument for alternatives to “modernism” as a period concept for studies of the twentieth century. It was also my first foray into quantitative work, which possibly explains why it has seemed to need so many further iterations since then. In any case, I now have an essay version, which I call “Modernist Studies without Modernism,” which I am ready to make public. I have posted it to an Open Science Framework repository which also points to a reproducibility archive with R markdown source code for the essay and (processed and cleaned) data.