WTF Genres?
Where did genres come from, why did they stick around, and what good are they?
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium! Find my fiction at the Bibliotheca!
A friend of mine over on Facebook asked about genres. (Yes, I’m still on Facebook, shut up! I’m old enough that it is where most of my college friends and family are…there is no escape!) Specifically, she was pondering the question: Why is a book classified into a specific genre and not another?
I gave her a short response in the moment, but as is the way of my people, it led to a deep dive on the subject. In the end I had a very, very long article that I realized I should probably chop into two. Here’s the first half, which is specifically about why you as a reader should care about genres. Part two will be about why you as an author should care about genres (or not!).
I mean…should you care? Maybe not. A good story is a good story, after all! But the real question my friend was getting at: who decides what is worthy of being deemed a “literary work” versus a “genre novel”?
That is actually pretty interesting. Who makes that call, and what do they base that decision on? Quality? Length? Tropes used or not used?
The answer is: none of that.
The fact is that there is absolutely no intrinsic reason for a book to be one genre or another in the modern publishing world (we’ll get to what they meant in the past later). Genres don’t grow on trees!
The imaginary line(s) exists for one reason, and that is marketing.
Or, as publishers prefer to call it: discoverability.
There are many “genre novels” that have beautiful, lyrical writing, sure, but the goal of having genres in the first place is discoverability. The goal is for readers who want “a romance novel” to get (sold) exactly that. It does not matter how transcendent the quality of the writing is. If it fits reader expectations for “a romance novel,” that is how it is going to be categorized because that will be the easiest and fastest way to sell that book in large quantities.
The key to understanding whether a book is in a genre or not is to understand how genres, as a concept, have shifted over the past couple of centuries from reflecting what we now define as broad classes of content types to calcifying around the expectations of the subject matter.
Historically, there have always been genres, but in the popular mindset prior to and during most of the 19th century, there was high brow and low brow, or “classics” and “popular fiction.” Everyone knew what a romance or a western or a “futurist” (sf) or a fairy tale was, because it was any story that contained elements of those settings/plots/themes.
But as sensible ways to divide up bookshelves? Not so much. They didn’t need to be.
Before 1800, there were only a couple of thousand books published annually in English. By 1820, that number had blossomed to nearly 6,000 annually, and grew rapidly. It was the dawn of the industrial revolution in printing, with the introduction of the Fourdrinier industrial paper mill in 1806 and followed quickly by steam powered printing presses (the rotary press showed up in the 1850s).
The result? By the mid 1800s, bookshelves were overflowing with books.
Keep in mind that medieval libraries usually contained less than 100 books. A university library of the Renaissance with a thousand books was considered very well supplied. As the printing press took off after the fifteenth century, those numbers went up, but library collections still remained tiny by modern standards. Bookstores even moreso.
By the mid 1800s, the flood of books had hit the shelves and there needed to be a way to sort them. Aside from the need to just be able to find something on a shelf, both booksellers and publishers (and libraries!) had a vested interest in making “discoverability” easier for readers among the deluge.
It’s easy to find a novel with a “western” setting when you are rummaging through 50 or 100 books, less so (or downright impossible) when facing shelves of books numbering in the thousands. Keep in mind that most big-box bookstores hold between 50,000 to 200,000 titles at any given time, and rough estimates of Amazon titles is anywhere between two to ten million (‘zon, of course, doesn’t share actual numbers). Imagine, for a moment, if they were organized by ideas like “tragedies” and “epic poems” and “comedies.” It would be overwhelming and personally, I would just sit on the floor and cry.
This was a very “modern” problem that was not going to get easier the more books were printed en masse. It’s not a coincidence that the Dewy decimal system was first introduced in 1876, since by that time libraries were exploding with books.
Booksellers and publishers did not need the fine-grained categorization of Dewy, though. What they needed was a way to get readers to buy books, and sorting them into popular genres was the easiest and fastest way to do that. Quality was not even an afterthought.
To start with, you need to understand is that “genre” has never been defined as categorizing texts by quality of the prose, but by the nature of the content. The earliest concept of “genre” in the West was (of course!) classified by Aristotle who broke everything literary (as opposed to history or philosophy) into four simple groups: tragedy, epic, comedy, and parody. Given the incredibly small amount of literature which existed at that time, it was enough. Note that these did not split them up into categories based on their forms (plays, poems, or prose). Nor were they divided by their quality or audience (nobility vs. commoners, for instance).
Time passed, and the definition of “genre” and how it has been used to categorize written works has fluctuated through the centuries (you can find a whole textbook on the history and theory of what a genre is, if you want to do a deep dive — all power to you!).
The issue is that this has become somewhat blurred in the world of modern genres. Aristotle’s genres became today’s classes, and yesterday’s tropes became today’s genres.
These days, the breakdown goes like this:
Form (play, poem, prose, etc.): The structure of the work.
Class (tragedy, comedy, romantic): Also referred to as genre sometimes, but more broad and encompassing than discrete.
Genre (western, thriller, romance, fantasy, etc.): A specific type of literature that usually follows particular structural and thematic styling. This includes sub (or niche) genres like reverse harem romances, LitRPG, and dystopian techno-thrillers.
Trope (enemies to lovers, the Chosen One, the comedic sidekick, etc.): A discrete literary/rhetorical device used in a story.
What used to be genres (epics, tragedies) became very general “classes” instead, and “genre” became the label for specific types of subject matter (romance, western, science fiction, etc.).
In many cases, the genre standards have calcified even further over the past 100 years so that the differentiation is not just about the content but the expectations of the subject matter. Less “what is it?” and more “how was it done?”
…with the exception of “literary works,” a.k.a. “literature,” which is just a free-for-all bucket for works consisting of (what someone decided is) “superior prose.” I’ll get back to that.
The form might be “a novel” and the content “romantic,” but a book is considered “a romance novel” not because it has a strong romantic plot but because it conforms to the established expectations for the subject matter (such as, it must have a happy ending, thus disqualifying Wuthering Heights, for instance).
As the pile of printed books grew and grew and grew, the more necessary it became to make sure that reader expectations matched a book’s categorization. Genres slowly calcified from the mid-1800s through the early 1900s until they became enshrined as immutable, but only because it made marketing books easier.
As mentioned earlier, the strict definition of a genre romance is that it has a happy ending which is why no one today would consider Wuthering Heights to be a genre romance novel, despite the focus on romance and love and pining. That isn’t the story, because we understand that it’s a tragedy with romantic elements. If any theme will immediately put a book into the wide bucket of “literary fiction,” it is being a capital-T Tragedy.
Westerns might be set in any era, but they need to be located in the American West and feature the standard themes of “a genre Western” such as the loner hero with a mysterious and/or tragic background, and a fight for freedom or to protect “innocents.” (Historically, Westerns have been irredeemably racist, but it’s not a genre I keep up with, so I hope that has changed.) These days this shows up more in genre crossovers like science fiction westerns or fantasy westerns. Many genres and literary traditions have taken these themes and adapted them, but it’s only “a genre western” if it hits all the expectations for the genre.
Unfortunately, the reverse is true too. It doesn’t matter how well written the book is, if it’s a romance with a happy ending, then it is summarily dismissed as being just a romance novel. It could contain some of the most magnificent prose ever written, but the author will be overlooked, since, as we all know, romance is never literary in nature.
Which is absurd, because of course it can be literary in nature, which is why in some stores you will find Jane Austen in the “literature” section and in other stores you will find her works in the “romance” section. Sometimes copies will be placed in both locations!
Remember, it’s not about the content, it’s about the SALES. It’s is about discoverability.
Which circles us back around to the non-genre genre, “literary works.” One defining feature of literary works, aside from the expectation of excellently written prose, is that the story does not fall into the expectations of other established genres. People will fight over that and it can get nasty—is the novel Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty a genre western novel, or fine literature? Well, it’s a genre western novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, so arguably, it’s both. Like Austen’s works, you might find it in multiple sections of a bookstore, depending on who is stocking and what their opinion about it is.
The genre expectation for literary works, though, is that they do not follow or, even better, they subvert reader expectations. Which is why, sometimes, really poorly written works end up being called “literature,” because, again, even in a non-genre genre, quality is far less important than discoverability and sales.
Which is why modern genres are so important to writers. But that’s for part two!
Part Two: WTF Marketing?
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I long for a genre that allows new authors to write protagonists aged 14-15. Currently, this age is taboo - too old for Middle Grade, too young for YA.
Really so interesting. This got me thinking of my niece's favorite band, the AJJs. She describes them as Folk Punk. It seems so alive to merge genres.