Abstract
This chapter argues that the contemporary turn to genre is an important aspect of the contemporary novel. It argues that realism has been the defining feature of the class of novel properly understood as having the cultural cachet to be called “the” novel, and that the recent turn to genre in literary fiction—in “the” novel—is best understood not in merely aesthetical, but in political terms, as suggesting the possibility of new literary class alliances. It suggests that the successes of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad in various different contexts of prizes, recognitions, and market success show the way in which such alliances can form, and how they are best understood.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2019, Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, a sprawling fantasy epic, was short-listed for the National Book Award, though he did not win it. All the way back in 2007, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize; that same year, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a heavily literary novel with considerable genre elements, won several science-fiction awards, but did not repeat Chabon’s 2001 win of a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
- 2.
Attempts are frequently made, of course, to set a list of possible characteristics. Günter Leypoldt, for example, suggests that the “literary” novel is defined by “stylistic or formal innovations that expand a novel’s aesthetic possibilities, a ‘privileged’ imagination or intellectual distinction resulting in ‘world-disclosing’ new visions, or an expressive representativeness that captures a cultural or historical moment or the way a culture thinks and feels about itself” (2018). These categories are, of course, more or less open themselves to definition, and in fact, are non-exclusive of non-“literary” novel forms, except when the determination is made beforehand. Thus, a Jonathan Franzen novel, which may very well fail to be any of the things Leypoldt sets out, will probably still be literary by dint of Franzen’s pre-existing prestige as a writer, while a G. R. R. Martin novel, despite successfully fulfilling all the criteria listed (incidentally: by whose determination?) will not.
- 3.
All this becomes a bit more complicated—though not insurmountably so—when we consider the two other big genres of genre fiction, crime fiction and the romance, which are, after all, realistic in their ontologies: they do not present the fantastic or impossible. We might note in passing the importance in this context of the idea of “magical realism” and the way in which authors in its tradition (especially, perhaps, Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Marquéz; see Joshi 2018: 227) were able to ascent the pinnacles of literary fame and recognition. Alejo Carpentier’s insistence that magical realism captured a particular postcolonial Latin American reality lays claim to a tradition of realism in the novel that is also a claim to literariness (see Carpentier 1995).
- 4.
Dubey’s essay in fact rejects the project which post-postmodern realism, according to its practitioners and supporters, appears to embody, but recognizes the validity of the claim that there is such a thing.
- 5.
I expand on this argument, and the arguments sketched below, about The Underground Railroad in my forthcoming Speculative Historism: Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary Novel.
- 6.
Leypoldt (2016) offers one example, although he doesn’t flag it as such, when he describes the difficulty participants in Oprah Winfrey’s book club had in understanding Toni Morrison’s genuinely really complex novel Paradise. I offer a much more extensive argument on this point in Speculative Historism: Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary Novel, forthcoming.
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Lanzendörfer, T. (2020). The Novel Network and the Work of Genre. In: Lanzendörfer, T., Norrick-Rühl, C. (eds) The Novel as Network. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_5
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