Literary Genre Wars’ Secret Truce – Flavorwire

Enter New Yorker editor Joshua Rothman, whose recent piece, "A Better Way to Think About the Genre Debate," clarifies the stakes of the discussion while offering a broader historical perspective. Rothman's essay is easy to paraphrase: what we now consider to be the "literary novel" was itself once a genre. Specifically, modernist novelists like Virginia Woolf looked with disdain and frustration on the social novels of the 19th century (Dickens) and the newborn mass culture of the early 20th century. So they went in another direction entirely, producing "spiritual" works whose "aura" still hangs over the 21st-century ideal of literary culture. The problem, though, is that we no longer have a mass culture. So literary culture, Rothman says, is left in a state of confusion.