From:
tieresias@att.net That said, it is what it is, and
although you might think that genre fiction is literary
fiction, it's not. That's not my take on it, as there are
hb/noir authors out there who I think deal with existential
questions far better than some of the supposedly
"existentialist" authors in the "literary" canon. Rather, it
is the take of the industry. Are they right? Who cares?
I do. Because as long as we take the commercial
categorization seriously, or allow others to pretend that
it's more than an attempt at marketing, we will see a
pointless trivialization of first-rate work, and a common
pretense that any work commercially classed as "literary"
somehow escapes genre and also is necessarily a better book
or more worthy of attention for that fact. The snobbery, from
both "literary" and "genre" camps, which ensues is as
exasperatingly self-defeating for support of good literary
work as it is moronic. It does make for easier marketing,
sometimes, particularly for work which strokes the commonly
sought-after conventions of whatever literary genre the work
can be shoved into.
Though HB certainly seems a child of naturalism to me, and
thus has siblings and cousins in the "literary" genres, some,
as already noted, well worth the investigation here. Also, of
course, among westerns and other "genre" genres. TM
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