The Mystery of Genre and Why We Need It

The world is full of categories.

Walk into any book store, and you’ll find shelves covering everything from health to sports biography.

Music is the same.

So is film, TV, and even the web.

But does it save us that much time?

Or does it just save us from having to think?

Well, firstly, it is a marketing ploy. Writers can’t photosynthesise, so they have to earn a living somehow.

Taking a quick introductory step, looking back at the great history of published writing, we find that genre has always featured prominently. Aristotle was the first to outline the genres, in his Poetics (335 BC), by literary characteristics, whether prose or poetry or performance. This served as a critique of the parts of the different arts.

But to get into the commercial nature of the subject, we need to jump ahead to the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press, around 1436, as the leading innovation in printable type. This allowed for a more comprehensive, cheaper distribution of source material.

Now we have an audience — limited, of course, to those who can read, but still more comprehensive than the original transcribed audience. Works are now more easily printed and sold instead of handcrafted for particular individuals.

This means literature is more easily handled and closer to what we know today — namely, walking into a bookstore and finding something to read.

However, with this innovation comes the need to sell — just what are people going to read? So labels are created, which cite the work by category. Let’s consider a familiar name for a second — Shakespeare. His works are defined primarily as either comedy, tragedy or history, depending on the play's content. Reference to the content of the work was displayed on the front cover in elaborate detail (it’d take a couple hundred more years for readers to get nuanced about their book covers). The same was true for published scientific works, papers and travelogues.

Hence, works such as Thomas Moore’s Utopia (1516) or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) play with conventions — they’re imitating another category to inspire the imagination. People came to expect specific ways of writing and sought those out. Writers with enough wit could play on those and bring in readers with other interests, such as Swift did bring in those interested in the rapid exploration of the new world.

If you thought market conditions hampered these writers, the magazine trade would seem a nightmare. Magazine publication began in Germany (obviously, since it was the home of the printing press) with Erbauliche Months Unterredungen (1663) (‘Edifying Monthly Discussions’), a philosophical journal. It had much the same attitude as a pamphlet, except new content was published under that same name every month. So, if you liked the first edition, you could expect great things with the next, and so on.

General interest magazines began to phase in with The Gentleman’s Magazine. (1739) in England, and other magazines, such as Blackwoods (1817), would increasingly include literature. Although generally of a particular style and standard, distinctions in literary magazines became apparent until the latter half of the 19th century. Essentially, this change was the cause of a wider reading public, with education reforms in the 1880s. Suddenly, there was enough market to create variety.

This is precisely what happened — enough people shared an interest in romance, for example. So one publisher began to capitalise on the field, with a magazine dedicated to the topic. Whole genres were born in this decade.

Take science fiction as an example. It can be argued to have existed before then, semi-consciously in the works of Jules Verne, who wrote adventure novels in the Voyages extraordinary series. The adventure itself was, of course, a genre in its own right. Verne became known for their exploration, discovery and daring works, and his works were brought for that reason.

By 1926, however, some of his works had become distinguished in a different way, which has changed the way we’ve viewed Verne ever since. Editor Hugo Gernsback, motivated by his magazine's success on gizmos and gadgets called Modern Electronics (1908), decided to dedicate an entire magazine to science-based fictional adventures, called Amazing Stories (1926). This was also partly inspired by his fictional stories' attention in Modern Electronics. Since he had an audience, he decided to give his new magazine a genre — ‘scientification’.

I won’t rabbit on about science fiction for those who are uninterested (but please, please, please, please request me to do so elsewhere, as it is my favourite topic). I will say, however, that Amazing Stories became hugely successful, inspiring competitors who distinguished their versions of ‘scientification’, later science fiction, by adding sub-genre twists, such as stories set in parallel worlds. Magazine editors even controlled the quality of production — Joseph W. Campbell, the editor (although not the first) of Astounding Stories (1930), has been quoted as changing the field of science fiction forever by only accepting stories that lived up to his idea of quality. And, because of the demand of his magazine and its marketable quality, the writers featured in there went on to have huge careers, changing the field forever. Think Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, etc. If none of these names rings a bell with you, I’m afraid you’re beyond saving.

I’ll end the history lesson here because we can all extrapolate the change the internet has brought about. Ease of access, reduction in material costs (with e-publishing) and fewer restrictions on who gets to publish what have removed any remaining barriers to publication, allowing many more writers to join the brethren.

However, we readers still crave those distinctions — with so much to choose from, we, and marketers, need to know where we’re going to be looking for our next fix of words. So genre remains.

But all this ramble is to outline the problem. While new sub-genres evolve quicker than bacteria, the main categories broadly vary. Contemporary science fiction isn’t created every day.

We also only really see a complete shift in style every generation. Time is needed to grow a classic and distinguish modernism from postmodernism. Without the benefit of much hindsight, we don’t know whether we have a new literary tradition on our hands or not.

So, we can rest in the comfort of knowing that genres, if not sub-genres and their respective works, won’t get out of hand any time soon. If we want fantasy or biography, we know where to look.

Moving on to my second point, does it stop us from thinking? If it’s just a marketing ploy, why do we need it?

Here I’ll move on from history to opinion. While the genre has evolved from marketing needs and societal needs (such as the need to publish scientific content), it does more than trick our brains into buying a book just because it’s got sport in the title.

Genre is also a discipline that is widely used by academics. Genre helps people get into a frame of mind, useful for evaluation.

To go back to science fiction for a moment, the genre's conventions tell us — something. I hesitate to say precisely because the definition of the said genre is hotly contested. Still, my take is that it tells us we’re thinking critically about a logical, supposed world in which something happens.

To rephrase, a science fictional world is based on some form of the logic of a scientific nature, and the text is a discovery of the implications of a logically introduced plot point. For example, what if aliens existed and they decided to visit? What if we invented time travel? What if dogs became sentient? All models have to adhere to some form of logic, usually our established world of science, taken a step beyond what we know to explore something we don’t.

We can do this with any other genre too. Science fiction is often paired with fantasy, which explores worlds unlike ours, without the established logic system (but often having some rules; otherwise, it’s a very dull free for). These are usually paired under speculative fiction, which asks what if.

And so on. Westerns are usually time-critical, involving a style of life that existed throughout the 19th, and early 20th, centuries in America, where the frontiers of society were still being established. Romances involve two characters who like each other an awful lot. Etc, etc.

Because we’ve established a genre, we can then decide on many other things. Firstly, we know its history, which is seven-tenths of academia. We understand why, when, and how it was published and its significance in that field. Secondly, we’ve rules around how to think.

Picture a game of chess. Each piece moves differently but has rules about how to do so. Yet, despite these rules, we can be inherently creative in our choices. Moreover, our creativity seems boundless with all the pieces at our disposal (although mathematically, it’s not).

A genre helps guide us into thinking, which aids our ability to analyse a text. If we know someone is writing a romance, we know what rules they’re evoking and how they’re changing/evolving their text to suit or subvert that field. In science fiction, we see the writer put on a logical mindset to think from a scientific point of view. We’re escaping all that logic and exploring the known impossible in fantasy.

If we jumbled science fiction and fantasy together, we’d get an entirely different point of view — the world is not simply logical but also exists beyond scientific comprehension.

All of which isn’t to say we should consistently enforce the rules. Writers who aren’t starving don’t always think in terms of publishing for a genre, and many disagree on where they are placed on the spectrum. The definitions are fluid, and multiple.

But the great thing about academia is that we’re only reading the text that way if we choose. We choose to put on our science fiction or Western hats in order to derive a point, larger than the text itself. If we read a text a certain way it’s to say how the genre would interpret it, and what a mode of thinking could do. It offers more possibilities, not less.

So, genre doesn’t have to be the death of creative thought. It can, in fact, inspire more creativity, if we continue to question the conventions that the market advertises. If we don’t, however, we can always just rest assured that our favourite sections will keep pleasing our monkey brains, which are used to the same stimulation.

I should know — I frequently only shop for science fiction.