It leads to another question of how a work of fiction becomes a genre? I suppose that has a lot to do with the business of publishing and selling books, but those decisions that the publishers and agents and all those folks make has to be based on something that led them, or their predecessors to divide up work and authors into genres.
Well, as for "horror," I don't believe that genre horror existed, as we think of it today, prior to the 1970s or so. It arose as a marketing strategy on the part of publishers who wished to capitalize on the success of a small handful of bestsellers. I think it's safe to say that "horror" owes its genrefication to industry. There are other genres which seem to represent more natural groups (sorry, it's hard for me not the think like a biological taxonomist sometimes). Westerns, for example. Romance. But no genre is immutable. All the lines are fuzzy. There are always crossovers. Mostly, I just think it's an enormous waste of time to go on and on about what constitutes a genre or whether something is fantasy or sf or horror. It's all fiction. All fiction is fantasy, to one degree or another. I don't get hung up on the plausibility of one fantasy as compared to another, as it seems a dubious enterprise. The Lord of the Rings is no less false and no more true than, say, Light in Augsut. I try to leave it as that. Other will disagree.
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Date: 2006-01-24 08:38 pm (UTC)Well, as for "horror," I don't believe that genre horror existed, as we think of it today, prior to the 1970s or so. It arose as a marketing strategy on the part of publishers who wished to capitalize on the success of a small handful of bestsellers. I think it's safe to say that "horror" owes its genrefication to industry. There are other genres which seem to represent more natural groups (sorry, it's hard for me not the think like a biological taxonomist sometimes). Westerns, for example. Romance. But no genre is immutable. All the lines are fuzzy. There are always crossovers. Mostly, I just think it's an enormous waste of time to go on and on about what constitutes a genre or whether something is fantasy or sf or horror. It's all fiction. All fiction is fantasy, to one degree or another. I don't get hung up on the plausibility of one fantasy as compared to another, as it seems a dubious enterprise. The Lord of the Rings is no less false and no more true than, say, Light in Augsut. I try to leave it as that. Other will disagree.