Genre Bending

The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction

Detective, horror, fantasy, romance, science fiction, spy thrillers, westerns, zombie novels. In recent decades, acclaimed and ambitious writers of literary fiction have increasingly gravitated to popular fiction genres. In this comprehensive account, Jeremy Rosen describes literary fiction's embrace of genre fiction's conceits as "genre bending" and argues that while literary writers adopt genres for a wide variety of purposes, what they share is a revitalized attitude toward genre—a recognition that while genres can be used in formulaic ways, they can also be adapted and transformed endlessly.

Rosen reads across the outpouring of fiction of the last several decades by writers like Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Kazuo Ishiguro, Chang-rae Lee, David Mitchell, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Haruki Murakami, and Colson Whitehead. He finds that literary writers' embrace of popular genres is the product of several seemingly contradictory forces, including their attempt to extend a modernist-inspired project of formal experiment, to pursue high cultural prestige, and to preserve the distinctiveness of the literary, which they perceive to be under threat, while also embracing the role of providing pleasure to readers. Examining what today's most critically acclaimed and widely read literary writers have done with the genres of genre fiction, Genre Bending reveals the values, practices, and forms, as well as the tensions, that constitute literary fiction today.

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