What makes a genre?

[cathschaffstump]

Noting that JABberwocky sent me my rejection yesterday afternoon.

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On our way to the break out novel so far, we’ve discussed the “good” book, what makes a book good for discussion, and what the heck literature is anyway. I try to keep this discussion very accessible to my college students.

I’ll admit, the genre discussion is one that we don’t have in class. My colleagues at the college and I *do* teach genre books frequently in our classes. Two of us use Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale for example. At its core, another book I teach, Native Son is a murder mystery as well as a social commentary. The separation of literature from genre is often artificial. Speculative fiction, a “new” field of writing, suggests that it is novel to combine genres. I have friends that are currently publishing “forensic fantasy.” Alternative history has been accepted as fantasy, but is really a happy marriage of fantasy and historical. Urban romance combines the fantastic with gritty action-adventure.

Genre divisions are very artificial indeed. How do we decide what a genre is? After all, we can break out of a genre with our break out novel if we don’t know we’re trying to break out of.

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Originally published at Writer Tamago. You can comment here or there.