Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace

Minor characters: overshadowed by definition, all of a sudden they are taking over the popular literary landscape. These characters have help, of course. Over the last several decades, an eclectic and ever-growing assortment of contemporary writers has been seizing minor figures from the original texts in which they appeared and recasting them in leading roles. Take, for example, Christopher Moore, whose Fool (2009) retells Shakespeare’s King Lear from the perspective of Lear’s jester. Fool offers readers a particular pleasure, the kind conjured by the very title of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which appeared in the same year: the frisson of witnessing the symbolic desecration of a hallowed literary monument. In an “Author’s Note,” Moore unrepentantly describes his desire to “put [his] greasy hands all over [and] befoul” Shakespeare’s “perfectly elegant tragedy.”¹ Moore has made a career of putting ribald spins on popular genres,² and in travestying a classic story while narrating from the point of view of its protagonist’s sidekick he reprised a formula he had already exploited in Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002). The reliability of this recipe has not escaped the notice of the author or his publisher HarperCollins; Moore has recently dipped into the well again, publishing a sequel to Fool entitled The Serpent of Venice (2014), a mash-up of Shakespearean characters and settings, rolled together with allusions to other canonical literary works. In fact, Moore is far from alone in recognizing the vast potential for iterations of this formula. With these novels, he joined the steadily growing international throng of authors who, since Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), have adopted the genre I call “minor-character elaboration,” a genre constituted by the conversion of minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new ones.

It might seem perverse to cite Rhys and Moore in the same sentence—perhaps even in the same book. Aggressively rewriting Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to focus on the now famous “madwoman in the attic,” Wide Sargasso Sea has become canonical in its own right, a paradigmatic text for feminist and postcolonial scholarship. Whereas Fool proudly advertises itself, in a pull-quote blazoned on the back cover of the Harper paperback edition and in a prefatory “WARNING,” as a “bawdy tale” containing “gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity.” But the ostensible perversity of linking these texts actually demonstrates the wide range of uses to which the techniques made famous by Rhys’s novel have been adapted in the decades since its publication as well as the popularization and conventionalization of gestures that seemed radical when Wide Sargasso Sea appeared.

To date, the flourishing popular genre Rhys’s novel helped inaugurate has remained largely invisible to literary scholars precisely because when they have written about contemporary rewritings of canonical literature they have tended to focus their attention on texts such as Wide Sargasso Sea that mount a critique of the traditional Western canon and ignored many others such as Fool that fail to adopt a stance of political opposition. To be sure, a series of contemporary writers have closely followed Rhys’s precedent by constructing narratives around the perspectives of socially marginal figures from canonical texts, often seeking to critique the ideologies underlying the manner in which those texts represent minor characters—or their failure to represent socially marginal figures at all. This subset includes Christa Wolf’s Cassandra (1983), which revisits the Trojan War and the story of Agamemnon’s homecoming from the perspective of the eponymous Trojan prophetess; Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), which imagines a slave half-sister for Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara; and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), which converts Penelope and a chorus of the twelve maids hanged by Odysseus into dueling narrators. But, as the playfully profane case of Fool indicates, contemporary authors have put minor-character elaboration to varied use. Perhaps the most visible marker of the genre’s success as a vehicle for contemporary cultural production—conspicuous signs of it hailed me from the roofs of taxicabs and towering billboards in New York and Chicago as I began this project—remains Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) and the hugely popular Broadway musical adapted from that novel. ³ Many other works since John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) have imagined the perspectives of famous villains, including John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (2000); John Clinch’s Finn (2007), the story of Huck’s abusive, alcoholic Pap; and John Scieszka’s delightful The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, by A. Wolf (1989). ⁴ Like Scieszka, a number of writers have playfully reimagined nonhuman characters as their protagonists. Madison Smartt Bell’s “Small Blue Thing” (2000) makes Poe’s raven even more talkative, and when one gets acquainted with the woodworm aboard Noah’s Ark who narrates “Stowaway,” the opening chapter of Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1990), it becomes tempting to say that in the house of contemporary fiction minor characters have been coming out of the woodwork. In novels such as Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway (1999); Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008), which makes a heroine of Aeneas’s wife; and David Malouf’s Ransom (2009), which centers on Priam’s journey to redeem the corpse of Hector from an enraged Achilles, contemporary writers pay homage by imaginatively expanding the worlds of their illustrious forebears. Still other works, such as Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning March (2004), which makes a protagonist of the absent father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, seem little interested in dialogue, polemical or otherwise, with their predecessors, and use them as pretexts for the creation of historical fictions. These subgroupings inevitably overlap; many minor-character elaborations blend homage, critique, historical fiction, and humor.

This book began as an effort to explain how the proliferation of minor-character elaboration happened. When did this genre begin to flourish, and why have so many authors adopted its techniques over the past several decades? What satisfactions do such texts provide (or purport to provide) for their readers? What (real or imaginary) social needs does the genre fulfill? Why have publishers embraced these books, and how have they marketed them? And what can analyzing this genre reveal about the forms, politics, and institutions of the contemporary literary marketplace and postwar culture more broadly? At minimum, the fact that practiced genre-fiction hands such as Moore have gravitated to minor-character elaboration suggests that we need to revise our sense of revision—that is, our understanding of contemporary intertextual production,⁵ the fortunes of canonical literary works, and the politics of popular literary culture at the turn of the millennium. Literary scholars’ near-exclusive attention to intertextual works that endeavor to subvert their predecessors and can be championed as instances of feminist “re-vision” or “writing back” from the margins,⁶ ironically, seems analogous to the kind of exclusive focus for which minor-character elaborations fault their canonical predecessors. The “protagonists” of existing critical accounts of contemporary intertextuality, one might say, are works that mount an ideological critique of the canon for excluding or “silencing” socially marginal characters. While those purportedly subversive texts and the hopes scholars have attached to them are an important part of the story I tell here, when one widens the focus to observe the array of uses for which the generic technology of minor-character elaboration has been deployed, a different picture appears. One is forced to confront the (seemingly obvious) fact that a great many intertextual works do not launch a critique of the canon and that even those that do may not be performing the political work we think they are. I will argue that they instead serve to prop up liberal individualism and are deeply embedded in the mass-production cycles of multinational capitalism. Because if Wide Sargasso Sea offered a “revisionary paradigm” for feminist and subaltern responses to the canon,⁷ it also served as a template for a popular genre. The endlessly iterable form of minor-character elaboration, its aura of literariness, inclusive politics, and its message that we are all equally compelling individuals—equally deserving of protagonist status—have combined to make the genre an appealing vehicle for the culture industry to target baby boomers schooled in the liberal arts during the postwar expansion of higher education and sympathetic to ostensibly subversive or oppositional politics.

The trajectory of the genre—from its emergence amid the insurgent political movements and postmodernist experimentation of the 1960s; through the mid-1980s, when it is increasingly deployed and its principal conventions become visible; to the 1990s and 2000s, when the culture industry embraces and aggressively markets minor-character elaboration as a form of genre fiction—illuminates successive stages of the cultural history of the last five decades, demonstrating both the ambitions and the overly sanguine hopes of left cultural politics over this period. Minor-character elaboration initially seemed to brim with the potential to facilitate a radical critique of the literary tradition for neglecting subaltern perspectives and to help “recover” submerged narratives of violence and oppression, and literary scholars have embraced and helped propagate the genre accordingly. I show, however, the limitations of a textual politics that counts the liberation of the “voices” of fictional characters as success and that often relies on essentialist claims about who can access minor characters’ authentic voices. Rather than a subversive challenge, the genre’s ascendance signals a broad spirit of liberal pluralist inclusiveness and the prevalence of some postmodern banalities (there is no truth, only perspectives; everyone deserves a voice). The truism that any story can be retold from countless perspectives ends up helping well-read contemporary authors gain an elevated foothold in a competitive market for books and facilitating scores of genre-fiction iterations for a consolidated global publishing industry, which preserves the traditional canon’s cultural centrality by trading on its prestige. The canon thus returns triumphant, in and through a genre that seemed determined to point up its outdatedness, and it does so in the prevailing form triumph takes in contemporary life: triumph in the marketplace.

Because the production of minor-character elaborations has absolutely taken off in the past several decades, a narrow focus on politically oppositional texts also, and I think as importantly, represents a missed opportunity for studying genre: the adaptation of a literary form to diverse purposes, the way conventional forms disclose shared assumptions and social commitments, and the way such forms circulate through institutions and material channels of production and consumption. Literary and cultural scholars have not only focused the bulk of their energies on subversive texts. They have also defined intertextual genres according to such texts’ shared political affinities. ⁸ It should be fairly easy to see the problem of selection bias that results when one categorizes texts based on their common political commitment. Analysis of such texts will inevitably generate a partial picture of contemporary intertextuality, both incomplete and biased, in which subversiveness reigns supreme. If one understands genre, instead, as the shared adoption of a textual practice, as writers’ repeated adherence to and variation upon a given literary form, one is forced to confront the wide array of political and aesthetic purposes for which such a practice gets adopted. But one also finds that reading across the range of production using minor-character elaboration, of which I have so far merely sketched the surface, reveals deep continuities between a seemingly disparate assortment of writers. My analysis of minor-character elaboration thus offers to demonstrate what can be gleaned from the sustained and in-depth study of a genre, especially when a history of the evolution of literary forms is combined with cultural history and a literary sociology of the material conditions under which such forms circulate. And so, while I initially set out to write a book that explained how a particular kind of novel had become ubiquitous in the contemporary literary marketplace, somewhere along the way it became clear that Minor Characters Have Their Day was also a book about genre as such—what a genre is; how and why a given form comes to prominence, evolves, and gets re- and deformed over time; how genres function in cultural hierarchies and markets; and about the virtues and pitfalls of genre as an analytic method.

Minor-character elaboration offers a particularly instructive and topical case study for an investigation into the workings of genre—so topical, in fact, that writing this book has been an exercise in trying to keep up with each new instance reviewed in the New York Times Book Review or that I learn about from a friend or colleague. Because such a variety of writers spanning national boundaries, the political spectrum, and the ostensible divide of “literary” and “genre fiction” have adopted this genre in recent decades, it represents an object of inquiry with the potential to convey a wide-ranging picture of contemporary literary production that nonetheless remains focused on a particular kind of textual practice. Moreover, minor-character elaboration usefully demonstrates the overlapping of cultural spheres that are often thought to be in tension if not antithetical. The genre has become a popular form of genre fiction but also a vehicle that has launched prestigious prizewinning works of literary quality. Engagé writers have gravitated to the genre in order to articulate subaltern perspectives or critique the politics of representation in canonical texts, but others have used it to launch explicit programs of cultural conservation and homage. As the genre emerged to prominence in the late 1960s and has flourished over the decades since, its history runs alongside the “culture wars” and offers to disclose the outcome of those battles, the fate in contemporary culture of both the traditional canon and revisionist strategies pitted against it. The increasing adoption of the genre also coincides with the era of the publishing industry’s consolidation, suggesting that the success of minor-character elaboration in the marketplace can shed light on the effects of that consolidation, the kinds of texts that appeal to large-scale corporate publishers and their smaller “independent” competitors, and the ways such publishers market their wares to contemporary readers. And, as the writers who have seized on canonical minor characters hail from several continents, the genre demonstrates how form is portable, how influence hurdles borders, and how genre—and the global media corporations who dominate today’s publishing industry—establish transnational literary communities.

Like Christopher Moore, Margaret Atwood has found in minor-character elaboration a formal resource that she has returned to throughout her career. In her very short story “Gertrude Talks Back” (1992), Atwood converts Hamlet’s mother into a narrator and protagonist, anticipating Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius by several years, and she returned to Hamlet in “Horatio’s Version” (2006). ⁹ (Moore, Atwood, Updike: such are the strange bedfellows, surprising affiliations, for which genre study forces us to account.) In The Penelopiad, Atwood turns to the Odyssey, using her versions of Penelope and the hanged maids as alternating narrators who recount the events at Ithaca during the wanderings of Odysseus. Here the author’s purpose will likely strike literary scholars as a familiar one. Atwood has Penelope protest “the official version” of her story, Homer’s Odyssey, for using her character as “an edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been?”¹⁰ Atwood’s Penelope protests the ideological function of her character in the Odyssey, the way the character presents an idealized portrait of female fidelity. The author’s conversion of Penelope into a narrator and use of the maids as a choral counterpoint take part in a well-established feminist tradition of “recovering” previously silent voices from the margins of canonical narratives. ¹¹ In their final song, “Envoi,” the maids lament: “we had no voice / we had no name /… / it was not fair / but now we’re here /… / now, we call / to you to you” (Atwood, Penelopiad, 195). Atwood’s maids entreat contemporary readers to attend to their song and condemn the “honour killing” (193) that follows the climactic scene of the Odyssey and that the epic presents as part of the hero’s necessary purification of his home. ¹²

Like the Penelopiad, Le Guin’s Lavinia makes a narrator and protagonist out of the wife of an epic hero, but the novels differ markedly in structure and in their stance toward their predecessors. Le Guin’s Lavinia narrates the entire book, and when the author strayed from her home provinces of fantasy and science fiction to publish a novel set in antiquity, she set out to offer a song of praise. In the Aeneid, Lavinia is the Latin princess whose suitors Aeneas battles in order to win her hand and establish his dynasty on the territories that will later become Rome. While Virgil thus installs Lavinia in a crucial structural position in the epic, he has her appear fleetingly in it and does not give her a speaking part. But rather than attempt to critique the “official version,” Le Guin poses her novel, in an afterword, as “a meditative interpretation suggested by a minor character” in the Aeneid. ¹³ Le Guin’s précis captures quite succinctly the artistic venture that authors of minor-character elaborations undertake. Even literary works of epic magnitude (perhaps especially these) point to excesses that they cannot or choose not to contain—backstories, possible sequels or continued adventures, characters that readers barely glimpse. Contemporary writers take these “hints,” suggestions of stories untold or available to be told differently, “meditate” on them, and offer their own “interpretation” in the form of a new literary work. Le Guin seems aware of the broader recent trend in which Lavinia takes part, but in the novel, afterword, and interviews, she takes pains to reject the assumption one might leap to: that she intends Lavinia as a feminist response to or subversion of the Aeneid. Lavinia’s narration anticipates the desire for readers to enlist the novel to a feminist project and preempts dismissals from the likes of Harold Bloom: “I am not the feminine voice you may have expected. Resentment is not what drives me to write my story” (Le Guin, Lavinia, 68). ¹⁴ In the afterword, Le Guin makes plain, for any reader who might have missed the reverential posture of the novel proper, that she sees the book as homage, “an act of gratitude to the poet, a love offering.” Far from intending an assault on the Western canon, its values, or its hold on the imaginations of successive generations, Le Guin sees her project as a literal act of cultural conservation. She poses the novel as a bulwark for tradition, a defense against the eventuality that Virgil’s “voice will be silenced” with the “true death of his language” (273). ¹⁵

In interviews, Le Guin has been even more explicit in rejecting the mode of feminist re-vision or subversion. She maintains that she knows “how well Virgil understood women and the respect he had for them” and thus that Lavinia “was not written like Margaret Atwood’s Penelope book to right a wrong, or set Homer straight. You don’t need to set Virgil straight on women.”¹⁶ However one might be inclined to disagree with Le Guin on the politics of Virgil’s representations of female characters or distrust her comments in light of the independent heroine and single mother portrayed in her novel, what I want to stress here is how, by invoking Atwood’s Penelopiad, Le Guin registers her understanding that she is working alongside contemporary writers employing similar forms and methods without necessarily using those forms and methods for the same literary or political purpose—in other words, that she is working within and using a genre. The example of Le Guin and Atwood offers a compelling way of thinking about genre: not as an ideal category with static rules or criteria but as a malleable, historically dynamic kind of literary and rhetorical practice that may be manipulated according to the needs and purposes of those who adopt it. Thomas Pavel describes genre in similar terms, suggesting that genres are “norms” constituted by a “unique mixture of stability and flexibility” and lucidly defining genre as “a set of good recipes, or good habits of the trade, oriented towards the achievement of definite artistic goals.”¹⁷ With the exception of strict formal genres such as the sonnet, Pavel indicates that genres are flexible technologies, methods that may rely on a typical thematic content, formal device, or a combination of both. ¹⁸

After a period in which genre had experienced a “decline as a vital issue in contemporary literary theory,” recent years have seen a growing consensus about both the errors of earlier modes of genre study and the benefits of a renewed, more supple application of generic analysis as a critical methodology. ¹⁹ The current consensus represents a middle ground between two extreme philosophies of genre that have dominated its history: on the one hand, dogmatic transhistorical classification systems (from Aristotle’s Poetics to Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism) that formulate criteria that define a genre, often based on prototypical texts, and then determine whether subsequent texts qualify for “membership” or not—the country-club model of genre—and, on the other hand, romantic and deconstructive theorists (notably Croce and Derrida), who view generic classification as a misguided and repressive effort to impose pseudoscientific laws and categories onto singular, sui generis artistic entities. ²⁰ Recent genre theorists, discovering and adapting the work of the Russian formalists on the evolution of genres, have distanced themselves from these poles by considering genres empirically and historically, as dynamic practices that grow out of other genres and transform over time as new instances retain some features while adapting or discarding others. ²¹ Literary genres, in this view, are not static categories or corpuses, established groups of texts that abide by fixed sets of rules, though they are nonetheless made up of typified, codifiable practices that constitute norms. ²²

The particular utility of genre analysis derives from tracing the emergence and development of such norms, as their evolution provides a guide to literary and historical change. Jonathan Culler has recently called for more rigorous accounts of individual genres, as part of a return to poetics that would chart the formation of literary conventions, against which one might measure individual texts:

Minor-character elaboration exemplifies the way genres are constituted both by a set of relatively stable norms and a heterogeneous, historically variant set of practical instantiations. The genre’s history is discernible and has a conventional form, though writers modify that form as they deploy it in the service of various ends. I trace the recent history of the genre to the late 1960s, when contemporary writers begin to adopt the practice with regularity. Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was first performed that same year. Works such as Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969) and Gardner’s Grendel (1971) followed close behind, but a lag of a decade and a half—perhaps the time it took for these early examples to become sufficiently prominent—would intervene before producers began to employ the technology with frequency by the mid-1980s. ²⁵ But the late 1960s is less a moment of origin than a return; the expansion and revision of familiar stories and characters date at least to Gilgamesh. ²⁶ Paula Richman has written extensively on the history of manifold retellings of stories from the Ramayana from different geographic, caste, religious, and gendered perspectives throughout India, and she recently edited a collection of modern versions of these stories. ²⁷ The Homeric epics are only standardized versions of a far older, heterogeneous tradition,²⁸ and one need only think of Aeschylus dramatizing Agamemnon’s return from Troy, a brief account in the Odyssey, Ovid’s Heroides, Chaucer’s poetic treatment of Troilus and Criseyde, or Shakespeare’s recasting of the same couple to recognize the long history of expanding minor episodes and characters from Homer. ²⁹ Le Guin could cite Virgil himself as her model in this regard. And poets, from Dante’s and Tennyson’s Ulysses, Browning’s Caliban, and Pound’s modern Odysseus as “no man,” to H.D.’s extracting Claribel from the margins of The Tempest, have long been adopting classic characters as speakers. ³⁰ But before Eudora Welty’s short story “Circe” (1955), which converts the demigoddess into the narrator of a revised account of Odysseus’s travels to her island,³¹ one is hard pressed to find twentieth-century examples of minor-character elaboration, and there are no novelistic ones before Wide Sargasso Sea. ³² The highly allusive high modernists were less interested in appropriating minor characters or settings than in taking archetypal plot structures and mythic character types (for example, Joyce’s Ulysses and Mann’s Doctor Faustus) and transposing them into the modern world. Rather than the birth of a genre or a point of origin, the late 1960s mark a revival and proliferation of the practice, the awakening of novelists to its potential, and a particular concern for the socially marginal.

What becomes evident immediately is that the form of minor-character elaboration is malleable, adaptable. The basic practice of appropriating a plot, setting, and cast of characters from a canonical text while shifting the emphasis to a previously minor figure can be executed in a variety of ways in pursuit of different representational goals. It is not only that this form can be filled with different content—with the raw material of Jane Eyre or King Lear—but that the form can be stretched and pulled in any number of directions. As I detail in chapter 2, the conversion of a formerly minor figure into a narrator-protagonist who “tells her own story” has become the principal convention of the genre. In such texts as Le Guin’s Lavinia, Gardner’s Grendel, and Brooks’s March, the authors make their title characters into narrators who proceed to offer their sides of the familiar story. From the beginning, however, individual instances depart in myriad ways and degrees from what will, in retrospect, become recognizable as the genre’s conventional form. Critics and reviewers often shorthand Wide Sargasso Sea as the story of the “madwoman in the attic” or of “the first Mrs. Rochester,” but Rhys’s novel employs a tripartite narrative structure, alternating between the narration of the “madwoman” (whom Rhys renames “Antoinette”) and that of an unnamed “Rochester” figure. Further, as I stress in chapter 1, Rhys creates narrators who are not fully coherent, reliable, or sympathetic tellers of their tales. She thus invites readers to approach skeptically these formerly minor figures rather than be seduced into straightforward sympathetic identification with or sentimental attachment to them. ³³ Rhys’s alternating, fractured narratives refuse to replace a previous version of a story with one that claims to be a true report or authentic account of the narrator’s self and instead force readers to adjudicate among several conflicting points of view. Multiple formerly minor figures serve as rival narrators in later works such as Atwood’s Penelopiad, Christa Wolf’s Medea: A Novel (trans. 1998), and Brooks’s March, which embeds several letters to and from the wife of the eponymous protagonist—this partial epistolary structure representing another variation of the form. In these works, the conflicting viewpoints raise doubts about the objective truth of any narration, undermining any one character’s claim to offer an authoritative version. Wolf’s Cassandra has its title character narrate the entirety of the novel, but four rangy essays—on Wolf’s travels to ruins in Crete, challenges facing women writers, and a history of Western violence up to the Cold War—originally delivered as lectures at the University of Frankfurt, accompany the novel proper, giving the book Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays a unique multivoiced structure that blends the genres of minor-character elaboration and memoir. ³⁴

Wolf’s hybrid book—or Moore’s combining minor-character elaboration with a travesty of King Lear—demonstrates how texts frequently use multiple genres. Similarly, genres often overlap substantially with related ones. While keeping such fusions and boundary cases in sight, minor-character elaboration can be differentiated from related intertextual genres in order to historicize the proliferation of the practice, to establish how its conventional gestures emerge and become subject to innovation, and to determine the sociocultural significance of those conventions. When critics have considered texts that convert a previously minor character into a protagonist, they have often conflated them with other intertextual genres, particularly the common practice of “transposing” classic storylines onto modern settings (as in Ulysses, West Side Story [1957], Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres [1991], or Amy Heckerling’s Clueless [1995])³⁵ and the contemporary boom in novels that take famous authors as their protagonists (as in J. M. Coetzee’s Master of Petersburg [1994] and Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George [2005]). ³⁶ Minor-character elaboration is an intertextual genre distinct from others but also one that is subject to internal variation.

Texts such as Cassandra that combine multiple genres demonstrate the difficulties that face any scholar who would endeavor to quantify the production of texts using a given genre, the way the heterogeneity of actual literary texts frustrates any effort to categorize them neatly. Unlike the recent vogue of quantitative literary scholarship, which works at a high level of abstraction, genre study offers the flexibility to analyze the broader trends of the mainstream while remaining sensitive to the distinctive features of individual works, attributes that challenge readers and reveal ways of getting off the beaten path—ways that later writers may subject to heavy traffic. Theorists have often pointed to the gap between individual works and generic norms as a way of accounting for the singularity of masterworks, as in the well-known “horizon of expectations” posited by Hans Robert Jauss, but this gap is one that quantitative scholarship cannot see, let alone account for. Jauss calls the history of genres “a temporal process of the continual founding and altering of horizons,” and he replaces metaphors of generic evolution or development with “the nonteleological concept of the playing out of a limited number of possibilities. In this concept a masterwork is definable in terms of an alteration of the horizon of the genre that is as unexpected as it is enriching; the genre’s prehistory is definable in terms of a trying and testing of possibilities; and its arrival at a historical end is definable in terms of formal ossification… epigones.”³⁷ While I will dispute the notion that generic practices ever “arrive at an end,” at which point they can no longer be adapted, Jauss’s notion of a “testing of possibilities” provides a conceptual framework for understanding the varied iterations that have resulted when contemporary authors have adopted minor-character elaboration. Further, Jauss’s theory points to the way a revitalized mode of sustained genre analysis offers an adjustable optic that can attend to both a mass of conventional texts and individual divergences, and thus it is one answer to the problems of scale that face today’s literary scholars and scholars of the contemporary period in particular. ³⁸

Franco Moretti has undoubtedly been the most influential and provocative recent scholar of literary genre. His (more teleologically inclined) work on the “life-cycles” of genres incorporates a view similar to Todorov’s in understanding them as “Janus-like creatures, with one face turned toward history and the other to form” and suggesting that they “are thus the true protagonists of th[e] middle layer of literary history,” between the individual text and the long run. ³⁹ Moretti has prominently advocated a program of “distant reading” that abstracts and aggregates texts into quantitative data sets. Some distance is also demanded by the study of a genre such as minor-character elaboration. Texts do not serve as evidence on their own but rather in relation to others; clusters of texts will constitute the object of study rather than the individual exemplar. Moretti’s quantitative method, however, is too distant because it elides any distinctions among texts in the degree to which or manner in which they employ the resources of a genre, reducing all “members” of a genre to equal numerical “participation” in it. He acknowledges that “a quantitative history of literature is also a profoundly formalist one—especially at the beginning and end of the research process… at the beginning, because a formal concept is usually what makes quantification possible in the first place: since a series must be composed of homogeneous objects, a morphological category is needed—‘novel’, ‘anti-Jacobin novel’, ‘comedy’, etc.—to establish such homogeneity.”⁴⁰ Moretti’s approach (quantifying and graphing data from extant bibliographies), however, obscures this opening stage of analysis, giving the appearance that the process of categorization is a simple matter of sorting each text into the appropriate bin. But what about the text that is an anti-Jacobin comic novel? Does it fit into each bin? None of them?⁴¹ It is precisely the imperative to impose homogeneity on a heterogeneous array of objects that this study will avoid. Wai Chee Dimock delivers the crucial argument against such tidy systems of categorization: “Unfinishability might also be said to be a systemic failing in all genres—a productive failing—in the sense that none is a closed book, none an exhaustive blueprint able to predict and contain all future developments. Far from being a neat catalog of what exists and what is to come, genres are a vexed attempt to deal with material that might or might not fit into that catalog.” Instead of “distant” or “close” reading, Dimock argues for “breaking down the supposed opposition between the large and small…. If the macro scale depends on extended kinship, that kinship is demonstrated only if the micro evidence is sufficiently detailed and precise.”⁴² Similarly, Pavel recommends “detailed attention to the interplay between abstract categories and the originality of their instantiation.”⁴³ Oscillation between large and small scale, the abstract formal category and the empirical instantiation, is the method I adopt here, and it is one that makes an analytic opportunity, rather than an inassimilable piece of data, out of the text that doesn’t fit neatly into a given category. Dimock wonders, “what would literary studies look like if it were organized by genres in this unfinished sense, with spillovers at front and center?”⁴⁴ A messy proposition, perhaps, but in studying an empirical genre, particularly a contemporary, unstudied one that is constantly changing as new instances come into view, one discovers such spillovers everywhere. An account that does not try to reduce the complexity of a historical phenomenon demands acknowledgment of its unstable borders and overlap with other genres. Alastair Fowler captures the fact that genres are flexible technologies rather than stable categories with characteristic elegance: “In reality genre is much less of a pigeonhole than a pigeon, and genre theory has a different use altogether [from categorization], being concerned with communication and interpretation.”⁴⁵ In this view, a genre is a moving target—not a Janus figure but a Protean one, slippery, constantly changing shape.

This changeability (and the practical difficulty of discovering all relevant examples of a previously unnoticed genre—where does one begin to look?) is why I have resisted the temptation to try to quantify the production of minor-character elaborations or offer the pretense of an exhaustive list. As with any genre, the “horizons” or edges of what can be considered a minor-character elaboration are permeable and shifting. In the appendix, I catalogue more than fifty texts that have elaborated minor characters since 1966, but the attempt to locate and count all instances of minor-character elaboration is futile precisely because of the categorical instability I have been discussing. Counting first requires determining what counts, and such determinations are a matter of interpretation. But even finding a wide corpus of such texts has proven challenging. There are no existing bibliographies, and titles are not a reliable guide. ⁴⁶ Admitting its instability, I nonetheless insist that the genre has a real existence and a distinct set of properties, which this book isolates and analyzes in their specificity.

At the genre’s relatively stable center stands the double gesture of overt appropriation of a canonical literary text’s plot, setting, and characters and the conversion of a minor character from the predecessor into the protagonist of the new text. While the major story elements are retained, with the shift in emphasis or perspective to a minor character there is often a corresponding shift in details or the meaning of those events to the new protagonist. Looking closer at texts that employ these basic techniques, we immediately detect further variation. ⁴⁷ “Minor” is a relative term, and some texts adopt figures that are fairly central in the predecessor text (but not the protagonist, which would qualify the work as using a historically far more common genre: the sequel), such as in Atwood’s Penelopiad or Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius. Others, such as Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife (1999), make protagonists out of characters that are merely mentioned but do not appear in the precursor. Still others, such as Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, Barnes’s “Stowaway,” and Moore’s Lamb, center on characters that the authors invent from scratch and insert into a familiar story. The degree to which the precursor’s plot is retained also diverges. Novels such as Wide Sargasso Sea and Wicked largely offer the minor characters’ back stories and eventually connect with the events of their predecessors. Others, such as Nancy Rawles’s My Jim (2005), which converts the wife of Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into a narrator-protagonist, depict events that are contemporaneous with those of the predecessor but that occur in a different locale—back, in the case of Jim’s wife Sadie, on the farm where she is left in slavery while he has escaped downriver.

The degree and kind of canonicity of the predecessor texts also vary. Contemporary authors have frequently excavated minor characters from classical epics, the Bible, Shakespeare, and other “high-canonical” authors. But Randall’s response to Gone with the Wind, Maguire’s Wicked, and George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, which feature the bully from Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), demonstrate that contemporary writers have borrowed from what Moretti has termed the “social canon” along with the academic one. ⁴⁸ The kind of canonicity is significant; contemporary authors that elaborate characters from popular, as opposed to “high-literary” texts, are less invested in the prestige of their predecessors than in wide audience familiarity with them. Writers who want to lend their works an air of literariness or, like Moore, to violate cheekily a literary paragon are better served by appropriating a work that has achieved the elevated status of the classic. But it makes little sense to borrow a character from a work no one would recognize, and doing so might constitute a different, because covert, form of intertextuality.

Another aspect of the genre that varies considerably across its instantiations concerns the degree to which a previously minor character is altered or developed with respect to the earlier depiction. I settled on the admittedly unwieldy appellation “minor-character elaboration” because I believe the genre is fundamentally distinguished by the fact that when a minor character is converted to a protagonist, the character is meaningfully transformed, built into something new. The contemporary writer “elaborates” the minor character in the word’s earliest sense: “to fashion (a product of art or industry) from the raw material.”⁴⁹ This author adds labor, modifies the raw material of character from its initial instantiation. Such modification differentiates the genre from close relatives like spinoffs, sequels (both authorized and apocryphal), and today’s booming fan-fiction communities, all of which typically offer new plots for certain, usually major characters without fundamentally transforming them. ⁵⁰ When Kingsley Amis wrote the James Bond novel Colonel Sun (1968), he adopted Ian Fleming’s character and invented continued adventures for him. The novel should be considered an authorized sequel, both legally and in terms of characterization, because Amis’s Bond is recognizable as the same character as Fleming’s. But clearly the distinction between a sequel that offers more of the same character and an elaboration in which that character is significantly altered is a matter of degree and, in fact, interpretation. Readers might disagree about the extent to which, for example, the Darcy in Janet Aylmer’s Darcy’s Story (2006) is transformed or simply extended from that of Pride and Prejudice. That determining whether Darcy’s Story ought to be considered a minor-character elaboration or a sequel relies on close analysis bears out Dimock’s assertion that claims for generic kinship demand “micro evidence” that is “sufficiently detailed and precise.” Rather than ruling out texts that don’t “qualify,” however, my method will be to consider kindred texts as relevant to the degree their similarity and difference proves analytically useful. Darcy’s Story looks, on close inspection, more like a sequel—readers get more of the Darcy they know and love rather than a revised version of the character—but the novel certainly takes part in a trend of retelling classics from alternative perspectives as well as in the booming contemporary market for Austen rewritings.

The varying applications of minor-character elaboration also provoke the question whether genres can extend across different media. I have already referred to dramatic texts like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and A Tempest, both of which foreground minor characters from Shakespeare. As dramas, neither “adopts the perspective of” or “is told from the point of view of” a character—yet they redistribute stage time, spoken lines, and plot toward previously minor figures. ⁵¹ As plays may give enhanced speaking roles to and poems make speakers of minor figures, they adopt similar techniques as narrative fictions that convert minor characters to narrators. The woodworm who narrates only the first chapter, “Stowaway,” in Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, provokes another boundary question: What if the device of minor-character elaboration is folded into a larger multigenre structure? This is also the case of texts such as Marina Warner’s Indigo (1992) and Michel Tournier’s Friday (1967). Tournier’s title suggests a retelling of Robinson Crusoe that converts Friday into its protagonist. But like Defoe’s, Tournier’s novel is primarily about Robinson and adopts his perspective, with the exception of a five-page section focalized through the consciousness of the title character, Friday. Does Friday count as a minor-character elaboration if only this brief episode offers a new, inside view of the formerly minor character? Does only this section count? I want to suggest that these are the wrong questions. Rather than determining whether Friday or a play such as Rosencrantz or a children’s book such as Scieszka’s True Story of the Three Little Pigs qualifies categorically or counts in quantitative terms, the pertinent analytic question for such boundary cases ought to be: What does this example tell us about the way the techniques of the genre may be modified for varied purposes?

In general, an inclusive historicizing of the genre that takes into account but does not merely obey national boundaries and traditional divisions of labor into studies of drama, fiction, poetry, or high and low forms makes more sense than an exclusive one, and the adaptability of the genre to film, children’s literature, and the fairy tale, for example, indicates a broad sphere of cultural influence and a widely shared epistemology that an exclusive consideration of novels or “literary fiction” would obscure. If one is interested in a genre as a historically existing cultural phenomenon, then it is desirable to consider related forms of production in different media. Because genres are heterogeneous to begin with, constituted by a combination of shared features and divergences, genre analysis is inherently comparative and heterodox, even contemptuous of national borders, established periodization, “brow” height, and medium of delivery. This is the case not only because, as with Wicked, the musical, films, and plays may be adapted from fiction or vice versa but also because artists working in one medium may imitate and adopt genres that have been successful in another. ⁵² The fact that minor-character elaboration may be closely related to other practices, folded into larger designs, or deployed in multiple media suggests that focused analysis of the genre can illuminate the significance of nearby and related phenomena—as well as the cultural networks and institutions through which they circulate. Moreover, to acknowledge the blurriness at a genre’s borders is not to question the relative stability of its center. And it is in the shared conventions that constitute this relatively stable center that the genre’s social meaning can be discerned.

While individual minor-character elaborations appear as discrete iterations that test the number of possible variables offered by a basic recipe, genre study need not place exclusive emphasis on tracing formal innovation at the expense of extraliterary historical factors. Analyzing conventions, the shared characteristics that constitute a genre’s stable center, discloses the collective assumptions and priorities that explain the commitment of seemingly dissimilar writers to a common form while underscoring and making meaningful their differences. Genre study can thus reveal the ways cultural and historical change shape literary forms that a narrower focus on singular, exemplary texts and authors tends to obscure. ⁵³ Genres make visible the social functions of literature, the role of literary forms in articulating broader social and ideological formations. As Bruce Robbins writes, genres can serve as “building blocks of potential histories that link the literary to the nonliterary, thus making a larger claim on our attention than individual masterpieces or, for that matter, individual periods” because “there are social tasks that cause a genre to be seized on… and invested with special energy and representativeness.”⁵⁴ Moretti submits that literary historians ought to pay particular attention to convention, which “is a crucial concept because it indicates when a form has taken definitive social root, entering into daily life, innervating it and organizing it in ways increasingly undetected and regular—and hence more effective.” There is a trade-off here; emphasizing the conventional “enforces a harsh disillusionment because it strips historical existence of its openness to change, and aesthetic form of its pristine purity…. To talk about literary genres… means re-routing the tasks of literary historiography and the image of literature itself, enclosing them both in the idea of consent, stability, repetition, bad taste even. It means… turning… the paradise of ‘beauty’—into a social institution like the others.”⁵⁵ I have already begun to suggest, however, that conventions do not limit or preclude “openness to change” but rather appear retrospectively. Writers can slavishly adhere to formal and thematic precedents but also depart from them in unexpected ways, and the task of genre analysis is to oscillate between norms and the departures of individual instances—or to demonstrate how the extraordinary masterpiece that gains a wide sphere of influence inaugurates its own set of norms. ⁵⁶ Robbins’s compelling formulation, meanwhile, obscures the agency in the process of a genre emerging to fulfill social tasks. When genres are “seized on” at a given moment, who does the seizing and why? As I will elaborate in the next section, producers adopt minor-character elaboration because it helps serve their artistic and communicative needs, including the desire to meditate on suggestive hints in canonical texts but also because the genre helps them gain strategic advantages in a competitive literary marketplace. Thus there is a third avenue at Todorov’s crossroads: genre is “the meeting place” where form, history, and material and institutional relations converge.

Can one read in the conventional form of the genre the social needs that cause producers to “seize on” minor-character elaboration in the late 1960s and do so with increasing frequency between the 1980s and the present? What social tasks does the genre fulfill? The ancient lineage I sketched above in barest outline suggests that one might explain the proliferation of minor-character elaboration as a rediscovery of vast reserves of material from earlier stories that might be converted into new ones. Minor characters, on this view, persist as untapped sources of narrative energy, roads not taken, and literary history a garden of forking paths through which authors might backtrack, trying new directions. Writers of minor-character elaborations have often described their works as motivated by a particular kind of readerly desire: the desire to know more about a minor character, to fill in the gaps or silences that surround a “hint” or suggestion—a desire that seeks satisfaction by imagining a narrative where a mere trace was found before. We see this desire expressed for example when Jean Rhys writes that Brontë’s Bertha “seemed such a poor ghost. I thought I’d like to write her a life,” and when Tom Stoppard explains that his “chief interest and objective was to exploit a situation which seemed to me to have enormous dramatic and comic potential—of these two guys who in Shakespeare’s context don’t really know what they’re doing,” and when Nancy Rawles wonders about Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Who was he to his family and community? Who was he to his wife?”⁵⁷ Explaining the recent surge in minor-character elaboration as simply the discovery of untapped stores of subject matter on the part of contemporary writers, however, fails to account for the particular historical moment at which this kind of literary practice reemerges or for the frequent conversion of female and other socially marginal characters into protagonists.

The generic technology of minor-character elaboration does exploit the fundamental condition of limited narrative space, the fact that, as Alex Woloch has argued in his The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, “narrative progress always entails a series of choices: each moment magnifies some characters while turning away from—and thus diminishing or even stinting—others.”⁵⁸ But writers who have seized on socially marginal characters also frequently view these narrative choices as motivated and ideological rather than arbitrary. In understanding minor figures as possessing a disproportionate significance, such writers align with Woloch, who asserts that the stories of minor characters are not simply “excluded” but that the texts in which they appear “powerfully inscrib[e] the very absence of voice that the distributional system produces” (Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 42). This way of conceiving of minor characters as disproportionately significant dovetails with the “luminous detail” of New Historicism⁵⁹ and the prevalent critical mode of reading the margins canonically defined by Edward Said as “contrapuntal reading”: “We must therefore read the great canonical texts… with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented… in such works.”⁶⁰ In a similar vein, Molly Hite suggests that attention to the hidden or silenced stories of women is the foundational gesture of feminist literary practice: “The notion that stories inevitably both obscure and encode other stories has been axiomatic to our understanding of narrative since at least the eighteenth century; when construed as repressed or suppressed stories of the Other, these stories become the enabling condition for the writing and reading of feminist narrative.” For Hite, experimental feminist texts such as Wide Sargasso Sea critique the ideology and reorient the “value structure” of canonical predecessors by “emphasizing conventionally marginal characters and themes.”⁶¹

Minor-character elaborations that foster an appreciation of subaltern perspectives are clearly aligned with a broader turn toward a multicultural politics of recognition and attention to otherness. ⁶² Contemporary writers have imagined the experiences of peripheral female, non-Western, proletarian, and queer characters that populate canonical texts, which center on the dramas of white, male, upper-class protagonists. Or such writers have contested the way a canonical text depicts a socially marginal figure, finding the representation to be not only thin but also flawed, inauthentic, incompatible with their sense of reality, even stereotypical or demeaning. It would be tempting, at this point, to suggest that the genre begins to flourish near the zenith of multiculturalism and that the recognition of diverse perspectives absent within canonical texts parallels the push to expand the canon itself—and this has been the customary way literary scholars have approached such texts when they have engaged with them. However, when one takes notice of the profusion of minor-character elaborations in recent decades, it becomes clear that the multicultural turn is a necessary but insufficient explanation for the wide application of the genre’s technology. This technology has proven equally generative as a storytelling vehicle for elaborating characters that do not easily fit into any category of social marginalization—who are minor but not minority characters—Priam as well as Cassandra, the Big Bad Wolf in addition to Bertha Mason Rochester—suggesting more is at work than the “recuperation of the margins.” In chapter 1, I argue that feminist and anticolonial writers share with their contemporaries the ludic high postmodernists a spirit of unabashed cultural and intertextual appropriation, a turn to reader activism rather than deference toward the literary tradition. This appropriation may be used for the political project of critiquing the ideology that underlies the way a canonical text represents socially marginal characters but also, as in Stoppard’s case, for exploiting “dramatic and comic potential.”

To understand the social logic of minor-character elaboration, one must begin by recognizing that the genre’s intertextual appropriation has generally taken a particular, conventional form in the decades since Rhys and Stoppard pioneered its use. Though surface differences abound, authors adopting the genre have consistently structured their narratives around the points of view of the formerly minor characters, at times using an extradiegetic narration focalized through the characters’ perspectives but most frequently converting them into coherent narrator-protagonists who tell their own stories. ⁶³ Retelling a familiar narrative from a new point of view, authors who adopt minor-character elaboration reveal their commitment to a pervasive epistemology of perspectivism, the Nietzschean notion that any truth or meaning is contingent on a given perspective or subject position, be it spatial or ideological. ⁶⁴ Texts that use the genre endorse perspectivism with their very form; they make intertextual dialogue between multiple points of view a central structural principle. Because the genre affirms the value of such dialogue between individuals, each of whom possesses a different subjective point of view, I argue in chapter 2 that the genre articulates a liberal-pluralist political epistemology. Such texts often echo their formal perspectivism in self-referential moments, such as Rhys’s protagonist’s contention: “There is always the other side, always” (a line that Hite culled for the title of her book). ⁶⁵

In their commitment to imagining perspectives that were absent from canonical predecessors, minor-character elaborations undertake an intertextual project that extends preoccupations with perspective and point of view that have dominated the history of the modern novel. In an oft-cited moment of Middlemarch, George Eliot’s narrator interrupts her own telling: “—but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?”⁶⁶—a moment when the novel famously becomes self-conscious about its ability to select among multiple points of view. In calling attention to the selective focus of her novel, Eliot points to a tension so firmly embedded in narrative that it has become proverbial. But there are potentially far more than two sides to every story. ⁶⁷ Henry James’s famous metaphor of the house of fiction’s million windows similarly registers the possibility for any narrative to be told from countless perspectives, even if James himself would rigorously select among these in choosing his “centers of consciousness.”⁶⁸ The formal experiments of literary modernism went even further to wrestle with the absence of an objective, Archimedean perspective or God’s-eye view, and they play out the possibilities of viewing the world through the perspectives of multiple characters, each of whom has a unique subjective experience of it. ⁶⁹

The conventional form of minor-character elaboration that emerges in the mid-1980s is thus one bound up with modern novelistic practice and so is at one level not particularly surprising. If adopting the perspective of a minor character by converting that character to a narrator-protagonist or primary focalizer is not a remarkable or radical technique, this is part of the point. Minor-character elaborations in their ascendant phase generally abstain from experimental postmodernist forms that represent subjectivity as fragmented or constituted by discourse. ⁷⁰ Instead, they typically conform to realist or, better, sentimental conventions, in which point of view as form (either focalization or narration) is aligned with point of view as interest. That is, they manipulate narrative point of view in the service of the production of sympathy, concern, and identification with a previously minor character who was not, by virtue of her minorness, the principal object of concern in the precursor text. The typical method for achieving such a reorientation of narrative priorities is the representation of the character’s rich interiority—a subjectivity that was not represented in the precursor text. Seymour Chatman has lucidly summarized the workings of this conventional alignment: “Access to a character’s consciousness is the standard entrée to his point of view, the usual and quickest means by which we come to identify with him. Learning his thoughts insures an intimate connection.”⁷¹ Critical responses to minor-character elaborations such as Wolf’s Cassandra reflect the conventional alignment between point of view and sympathy as well as widely held modern assumptions about what constitutes plausible characterization, on which texts using the genre typically rely. In Wolf’s hands, Cassandra becomes “a fully rounded figure… an individual who changes and grows and finds new alternatives for living,” and the novel “interprets [the ancient Greek legend] in terms of psychological realism.”⁷² Another commentator writes: “Wolf recreates history from the point of view of this mythical woman and gives her a voice with which to speak of her own experience.”⁷³ Perhaps more important than their commitment to perspectivism, then, is the subjectivism of minor-character elaborations: the authors and critics who have embraced the genre conceive of its aesthetic and political work as occurring through the formal registering of the narrative “voice” and “fully rounded” psychology of formerly minor characters.

If the primary convention of minor-character elaboration suggests that its social function is to reassert the unique subjectivity and perspective of every individual by representing the interior states and “roundness” of characters that had been “flat,” depicted externally or cursorily in canonical texts, the genre can be seen as one that epitomizes the liberal individualist project that has been central to the history of the realist novel. Though literary historians have continually sought to chart the uneven development,⁷⁴ establish countertraditions,⁷⁵ and reverse the causality⁷⁶ of Ian Watt’s influential account of the rise of the realist novel as “the form of literature which most fully reflects [the] individualist and innovating reorientation” of Western society since the seventeenth century, they have nuanced but not displaced the notion that the representation of subjectivity has been the dominant formal project of the realist novel and that its primary, hegemonic ideological function has been to shore up belief in the sovereign liberal individual. ⁷⁷ If minor-character elaboration may thus appear as the most novelistic of novel genres, dedicated to doing what novels already do and thus showing the persistence of the realist project of depicting subjectivity beyond a postmodern moment that sought to decenter it, what makes the genre unique, fascinating, as well as problematic is the way its intertextual project attacks canonical texts for not being novels or canonical novels for not being fair to—not representing fully—all of their characters. The genre, that is, does not just offer, as with many realist novels, “round” characters and limn their complex interior states. Minor-character elaborations lay down an imperative to roundness. They allege that earlier representations are aesthetic, ethical, and political failures to do justice to minor characters.

Minor-character elaborations thus articulate in literary form the liberal ideology of the novel that Dorothy J. Hale has called “social formalism.” For Hale, social formalism manifests itself as a tendency in Anglo-American theories of the novel to posit that the novel “does not simply represent identity through its content but actually instantiates it through its form” (Hale, Social Formalism, 13). In the tradition Hale traces, the registering of a character’s internal state becomes more than just the best, or conventional, literary technique by which to represent fully a character; point of view comes to generate the “set of authentic interests that constitute a particular human identity” (22). By making the depiction of interiority “instantiate” and “constitute” identity, these theorists understand novelistic form as an enactment of democratic principles. When authors adopt a character’s perspective, “real characterological freedom [can] be achieved” because the character is allowed “to express himself in his own terms” (93); characters no longer will appear as “created beings” but as “wholly autonomous subjects” (120). ⁷⁸ Minor-character elaborations frequently make the illogical logic of autonomous fictional entities explicit, claiming that by offering the perspective of a minor character, the contemporary author liberates the character by allowing her to speak for herself. Thus Atwood writes in her introduction to The Penelopiad that she “chose to give the telling of the story to Penelope and the twelve hanged maids” (xv; my emphasis). Similarly, Le Guin’s Lavinia declares her independence from millennia under Virgil’s control: “If I must go on existing century after century, then once at least I must break out and speak” (4). In chapter 2, I demonstrate that critics who have championed instances of minor-character elaboration echo these terms because “giving voice to the silenced” becomes the consistent way they interpret such texts. Literary form, the representation of a character’s interiority or “voice,” is thus understood as a technology for enacting a kind of redistributive justice; to make a previously minor figure into a narrator is to grant her autonomy and self-determination that she had been denied in a canonical text. The creation of fictional characters becomes an act of liberation. The genre thus reveals the imbrication, indeed the conflation, of form and politics, exposing a common fallacy through which contemporary scholars overrate the political work of literary texts.

If this liberal ideology of the novel seems to rest on a glaring conflation of literary representation with democratic self-representation, it nonetheless constitutes a pervasive way of thinking about the novel that stretches from E. M. Forster to Woloch’s ambitious theory of characterization. Forster of course codified the distinction between “flat” and “round” that has become part of our everyday lexicon for discussing characters. The former are “constructed round a single idea or quality” and have “no existence outside” that quality. But Forster’s next phrase is even more revealing of how his theory fuses aesthetic categories with ethicopolitical ones; flat characters have “none of the private lusts and aches that must complicate the most consistent of servitors.”⁷⁹ Flat characters, in Forster’s account, lack the internal conflict that must persist in every individual, even within servants! (Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly [1990], whose narrator is a maidservant in Dr. Jekyll’s household and is briefly glimpsed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, and Jo Baker’s Longbourn [2013], which retells Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennets’ domestics, look to be dedicated to demonstrating the truth of Forster’s assertion that servants are people too.) Forster thus understands all persons as having complex interior states and flat characters, necessary as they may be to an author’s design, as failing to capture those states and thus misrepresenting what “must” subsist in such persons. Similarly, Woloch argues that novels continually generate a tension among the many characters they introduce, between the protagonist, whose interiority is represented in the text, and minor characters, whose perspectives are obliquely suggested in their absence. While Woloch is no doubt correct that readers might seize on these suggestions and speculate about the imaginary beings that are so briefly sketched in a novel, he goes beyond Forster in declaring that narrative discourse is unjust to (“diminishes” or “stints”) minor characters and even presses them into servitude, in that they are forced to perform narrative functions. ⁸⁰ Functional minor characters are “the proletariat of the novel” (27), and their “functionalization… effaces ‘the definite manifestations of definite qualities of individuals’” (27). Woloch insists that “each of these narrative workers also has a ‘case,’ an orientating consciousness that, like the protagonist’s own consciousness, could potentially organize an entire fictional universe” (22). This statement encapsulates the aesthetic ideology of minor-character elaboration and the social-formalist tradition in which the genre takes part; every character can be a protagonist because each one is an individual with “definite qualities,” a unique “case,” and subjectivity, even if that case is not depicted in the novel that constitutes the character. By imagining minor characters as endowed with a prior and autonomous existence, Woloch can claim that the failure to represent their particular qualities—presumably their “private lusts and aches”—“effaces” their individuality and constitutes an instrumentalization analogous to dehumanizing labor under capitalism. If Woloch’s theory seems extreme, I will insist, pace Hale, that it takes part in a broader tendency to view novels’ creation of round characters and consequent extension of sympathy to them as an enactment of democratic principles. ⁸¹ The creation of fully fleshed-out characters, in this tradition, is understood as a broadening of the sympathetic imagination that goes hand in hand with an expansion of the franchise and the wider march of democracy’s progress. Agency, autonomy, individuality conveyed through rich interiority, the right to be heard—these are the often explicit claims made on behalf of minor characters. In chapter 2, I argue that understanding minor characters as autonomous entities who have suffered narrative injustice at the hands of canonical authors facilitates an overvaluing of the political remediation of minor-character elaborations, which are read as repairing the “disjunctions” Woloch describes and thus setting minor characters free from their oppressive silencing. ⁸² But who is actually liberated, who is actually speaking, when a minor character “is given a voice with which to tell her own story”?

Genres, that is, don’t get “seized on” and come to reflect social formations by accident, magic, or the extraordinary ken of great authors. A succession of interested agents—writers, editors, reviewers, scholars—actively search for and promote forms that will serve their interests and resonate with readers. Considering genre in this institutional context demands attention to the relations between authors, publishers (and their parent companies), booksellers, and consumers and thus a shift in methodology outside of the texts themselves. This strand of genre study requires analysis of the ways texts are marketed, the art and blurbs on their covers, the book-club and reading-group guides packaged within them or offered online, and their reception by both professionals and amateur reviewers on websites such as Amazon and Goodreads.com. It demands scholars read literary texts as interesting and socially significant not insofar as they eschew convention and transcend commodity status but insofar as they are conventional, are commodities. That minor-character elaborations are popular fictions that trade on the timeless literary value of classics is less a paradox than evidence that the symbolic capital of the canon is both healthy and fungible, convertible to economic capital. That the multinational media corporations that dominate the increasingly consolidated global publishing industry are the ones accumulating this capital is a plain fact—but not one that literary scholars tend to talk about.

By analyzing the marketing of minor-character elaboration to contemporary audiences and the genre’s reception, I show how its institutional and market logic is connected with its social and cultural logic. In chapter 3, I argue that structural transformations in the publishing industry over the last thirty years have contributed to the proliferation of minor-character elaborations. Three giant publishers, all owned by multinational media conglomerates, have come to control half of the U.S. trade market. ⁸⁵ This consolidation has been noted often and bemoaned almost as frequently. But literary and cultural scholars have barely begun to consider how these marketplace transformations have affected literary production. Today’s large-scale corporate publishers are highly risk averse, seeking to maximize profit in the short term. In this milieu, publishers have turned increasingly to genre fiction because works that follow a proven formula and appeal to a preexisting fan base help combat the uniqueness, and hence unpredictable sales, of any new book. Genre becomes a mechanism for generating production, identifying audiences, and minimizing risk rather than a formal or aesthetic imperative. Understanding genre in these terms helps explain the broader regime of genre fiction we have witnessed over the past several decades—the succession of vampire, zombie, fantasy, science fiction, and romance franchises that dominate the market for books as well as for film and television. Undoubtedly each of these genres and each successful work or series carry their particular attractions for audiences—and scholars might endeavor to read the social logic of such genres in their conventional structures. But the production-side appeal of genre fiction as such has less to do with the qualities that make these works unique; it is precisely their similarity to others that makes them safe bets, reliable sellers. One striking feature of the catalogue of examples I’ve offered thus far is the combination of upstart authors who have made their names with minor-character elaborations (Brooks, Maguire, Randall), established literary figures (Atwood, Malouf, Updike), and luminaries of the genre-fiction universe (Le Guin, Moore, Atwood again). Studying the works of these writers alongside one another reveals not only how permeable is the border between “literary” and “genre fiction” but also the extent to which this body of self-consciously literary texts—highly allusive, intertextual works that invoke the transcendent value of the traditional canon—has become a booming popular genre in its own right. ⁸⁶ Minor-character elaboration demonstrates the way the great names of Shakespeare, Homer, and the rest function as prestigious symbolic signifiers that are as resonant in the marketplace as Apple or BMW, brand names ripe for appending to the mass production of genre fiction. Likewise, the genre points to the way “literary fiction” gains that status by obscuring its derivative features behind others that grant prestige.

Indeed, the history of minor-character elaboration reveals how the designations of “literary” and “genre fiction” are contested matters of reception rather than clear-cut distinctions of kind. Since genre is both a malleable technology and a form of literary practice that helps producers generate symbolic and economic capital, any “literary fiction” or “art novel” that utilizes an extant genre to any degree demonstrates the double impossibility of artistic autonomy. All such texts draw on earlier texts and forms and circulate in cultural fields and institutions in which successfully deploying a genre, or transforming it, facilitates the accumulation of both forms of capital, no matter how relatively autonomous these fields may be. ⁸⁷ Moreover, minor-character elaboration reveals how formally experimental and “high-literary” deployments of genre are historically continuous with the institutional propagation of those forms that leads to the production of formulaic genre fiction. The historical arc of my book demonstrates that the early stage of a genre’s emergence reveals multiple formal possibilities and agendas that writers might adopt (chapter 1). These possibilities do not evaporate or become prohibited, but they become less visible as writers follow precedent (though always with some variation) and gravitate toward a particular form to undertake a shared cultural and political project (chapter 2) and as publishers embrace and spur the production of similar texts in response to a perceived market (chapter 3). This book thus offers a history of how flexible generic practices and the testing of possibilities lead to the dissemination of formulaic popular forms—how they develop into genre fiction. Conventionalization is not an agentless or teleological process but the result of producers’ processes of imitation and selection that generate a conventional form. ⁸⁸ While these processes eventually flood the market with similar texts, they neither legislate that writers slavishly adhere to a formula nor establish a “contract” with readers who refuse to accept anything unconventional. New genres, including new popular genres, emerge precisely because producers can depart from existing conventions. Internal variations and fusion with other genres persist and are always potentials latent in a given kind of literary practice. (If the formulaic, mass-market production of genre fiction foreclosed further literary experiment with the same genre, one wonders how such writers as Samuel Delany or Octavia Butler could have enlivened the well-tilled ground of science fiction, to cite two of many possible examples of generic transformation.)

Much of the production-side appeal of genre stems from the way a given practice is available for both repetition and variation. Minor-character elaboration, for example, offers an endlessly iterable formula: retell X classic from Y minor character’s point of view. This genre has proven particularly attractive to producers because it adds to this basic formula a unique ability to solicit the attention of niche audiences: bibliophiles who recognize the prestige of canonical works and female and minority readerships that are reconceived as target publics. If minor-character elaborations share with other forms of genre fiction a recipe that facilitates limitless production, they have in common with other explicitly intertextual genres the ability to annex and trade on the prestige of the traditional Western canon. Minor-character elaboration represents a subset of the booming wider field of contemporary intertextuality that includes everything from performances and intermedial adaptations of canonical works, such as Shakespearean films, the latest in a long line of Jane Eyre movies, and the BBC’s Sherlock television series, to children’s versions of classics, such as the “Save the Story” series penned by famous contemporary writers that Pushkin Press launched in 2013 and 2014,⁸⁹ to the craze of travesties or “mashups” that surged in the wake of Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—a book that both thematizes and enacts the current mania for cannibalizing the classics—to the industry of Austen spinoffs, sequels, and paeans that Grahame-Smith set out to parody, to the boundless accumulation of fan fiction online. ⁹⁰ This cursory treatment cannot even begin to convey the extent of the field of contemporary intertextuality, and here I’ve only mentioned forms that explicitly mark their relation to a predecessor because a covert or unacknowledged allusion or rewriting is unlikely to capitalize on the recognizability and prestige of the canonical predecessor. ⁹¹ To point to this extensive market suggests again the narrow focus of much existing scholarship on intertextuality, which has tended to focus on “re-vision” or “writing back” as an insurgent political strategy;⁹² produce wide-ranging overviews of various intertextual modes and approaches under the umbrellas of postmodern parody, pastiche, rewriting, and other “parasitic” practices;⁹³ and analyze works that respond to a shared predecessor⁹⁴ rather than analyzing particular genres of intertextual engagement or treating the prevalence of homage, conservation, and appropriation. ⁹⁵

Minor-character elaborations share with this broader field a strategic appeal to the prestige of their predecessors and therefore an investment in maintaining the latter’s cultural centrality. In rewriting canonical works from new points of view, such texts frequently invoke the names of their illustrious forebears, billing themselves as fresh takes on old tales and as transhistorical dialogues between great writers. Moore’s Fool, for example, trumpets and reactivates the prestige of King Lear, in this case to deface it more effectively. In an “Author’s Note,” Moore acknowledges his audacity in “thrashing around in the deep end of genius with the greatest artist of the English language who ever lived” and heaps praise on Shakespeare’s “perfectly elegant tragedy” even as he explains his desire to “befoul it” (305). (Even texts that travesty a canonical predecessor endeavor to maintain its status because you can’t desecrate something that isn’t sacred.) Dialogue or call-and-response also serves as the model for the online publicity that Knopf, the celebrated house that is now an imprint of the colossal Penguin–Random House partnership, released alongside Baker’s Longbourn. Knopf marketed the novel as “an irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice” and cited Baker’s rendering of the inner lives of servants, her “portrait of the disappointments, dreams, struggles, and secrets of the lower classes that stands entirely on its own.”⁹⁶ Reviewers tend to understand these works in similar terms—even when they determine these dialogues to be failed or one-sided contests. A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement deemed Le Guin’s Lavinia “a moving testament to the conversations that great writers sustain through the centuries.”⁹⁷ Similarly, a New York Times appraisal of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2012), which makes a protagonist of the great hero’s companion Patroclus, regarded Miller’s adoption of an increasingly common generic practice as “an (appropriately) heroic task: to fashion a modern work of literature out of very ancient stories.”⁹⁸

Both the promotion of minor-character elaborations that insists they can “stand on their own” and the reception that positions them in a dialogue with (and deems whether they are worthy of) their canonical predecessors date to the earliest forays into the genre. Francis Wyndham’s introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea, which has always accompanied the text of Rhys’s novel, maintains that “it is in no sense a pastiche of Charlotte Brontë and exists in its own right, quite independent of Jane Eyre.”⁹⁹ Responses to Gardner’s Grendel generally concurred that the novel “illustrates the perfect rapport possible between two workings of a single myth. That it can stand beside the epic Beowulf is no small judgment on the achievement of the novel.”¹⁰⁰ The marketing and reception of minor-character elaborations thus aims at a readership that valorizes the classics and contemporary works of literary quality, one that like the authors of such works possesses considerable quantities of cultural capital. But to see how the dialogues these modern works initiate are subordinate to the strategic function of co-opting the prestige of the great books, one only has to notice how frequently minor-character elaborations take pains to reassure readers who lack familiarity with their canonical precursors. A prominently placed blurb on the Harper paperback of Fool cites a USA Today reviewer: “Whether you need to read the original King Lear before you read Moore’s Fool is debatable. Seems a fool’s errand to us. Just enjoy.”¹⁰¹ In a similar fashion, an O Magazine review insists on the low barrier of access for appreciating Miller’s novel: “You don’t need to be familiar with Homer’s The Iliad (or Brad Pitt’s Troy, for that matter) to find… The Song of Achilles spellbinding. While classics scholar Miller meticulously follows Greek mythology, her explorations of ego, grief, and love’s many permutations are both familiar and new.”¹⁰² In linking Miller with Homer but assuring readers they needn’t read the Iliad (or sit through Troy), this reviewer invokes Miller’s cultural capital and fidelity to the classics while insisting on her accessible and original take on ancient material. Annexing the prestige of the canon without demanding knowledge of it, faithful to the timeless classics yet fresh and imaginative, minor-character elaborations help contemporary authors gain distinction and enable their publishers to access an educated, well-capitalized audience.

If the genre shares with other intertextual practices a dependence and ability to capitalize on the prestige of canonical predecessors (demonstrating that genres’ social functions are not necessarily immanent to their forms), minor-character elaborations add to these qualities an air of inclusive, multicultural, or even subversive politics and thus help producers appeal to readers sympathetic to such progressive orientations and to identity-group audiences. As minor-character elaborations frequently adopt the perspectives of female and socially marginal characters, authors and publishers aim these books toward demographic groups that they anticipate will sympathize with such perspectives—strategies that become evident within the texts, in their publicity materials, and in their positioning within the marketplace. For example, Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997), which makes a protagonist of the biblical Dinah, offers itself as an empowering instrument of feminine education: “The more a daughter knows the details of her mother’s life—without flinching or whining—the stronger the daughter.”¹⁰³ My local bookstore shelved Randall’s The Wind Done Gone and Rawles’s My Jim side by side in its “African-American Interest” section, and the book jacket of Randall’s novel proclaims it to be the “emotionally complex story of a strong, resourceful black woman breaking away from the damaging world of the Old South to emerge… as a daughter, lover, and mother.” In addition, the dust jacket proffers the book’s revisionist politics as one of its major selling points; the novel “gives a voice to those history has silenced” and is “an elegant literary achievement of significant political force.”¹⁰⁴ This synopsis vividly demonstrates how the sociocultural logic of minor-character elaboration intersects with its institutional and market logic. The genre’s assertion that every individual regardless of race, gender, or class is equally compelling and therefore qualified to be a protagonist (deserving of a “voice”) is deeply compatible with the values of a liberal readership, and such texts are marketed to groups that share the identity categories of their protagonists. It is precisely not the case that minor-character elaboration emerges with an oppositional textual politics, only to see it diluted in the process of the genre’s popularization. Instead, that politics continues to represent a crucial component of the genre’s popular appeal.

The vast majority of minor-character elaborations that have appeared over the past several decades have appropriated characters from works in the public domain. But the lawsuits prompted by Randall’s novel and by the Italian author Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary, which poses itself as the journal of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, make evident copyright holders’ desire to protect both the economic and symbolic values of canonical works to which minor-character elaborations are perceived as threats. The volume of production using the genre stands as the most glaring evidence that publishers anticipate its profitability, and these lawsuits show that the estates of canonical predecessors share that sense. The terms of the settlement reached between Pera and Nabokov’s son Dmitri—according to which Pera was allowed to publish Lo’s Diary but only with a portion of royalties going to Dmitri (who in turn donated the proceeds to the PEN Foundation) and the stipulation that he append a preface granting his permission to her novel—reveal the eagerness of the younger Nabokov to limit Pera’s ability to profit economically and symbolically off of his father’s work. ¹⁰⁵ A suit brought by SunTrust Bank, the guardian of Margaret Mitchell’s estate, against Houghton Mifflin attempted to block the publication of The Wind Done Gone, and the estate seemed particularly bothered by Randall’s suggestion that Mitchell’s whitewashed image of the antebellum South concealed widespread sexual violence, miscegenation, and homosexuality. ¹⁰⁶ The intellectual-property issues surrounding fair use provoked by these court cases are fascinating, if they largely exceed the scope of this book on genre. ¹⁰⁷ But the basic facts of these lawsuits demonstrate that the copyright holders of canonical works perceive minor-character elaborations as economic threats—even though one suspects that the publication of new, derivative works actually funnels readers back to the originals—and as challenges to the symbolic values, artistic or political, expressed in or embodied by those classics.

While Randall’s book launches a direct attack on the mythology of the antebellum South fostered by Gone with the Wind, I show in chapter 3 that The Wind Done Gone is simultaneously deeply invested in promoting the value of the traditional literary canon as one of the principal resources drawn on by its protagonist Cynara, an avid reader of Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, and Austen. Minor-character elaborations not only serve the strategic function of helping contemporary producers sell books, by allowing them to annex the prestige of canonical works and identify niche audiences. The genre also helps reinforce the cultural centrality of the canon and promote literary culture more broadly—the persistence of which serves the interests of corporate publishers, of course, but also anyone eager to safeguard immaterial literary and cultural values. ¹⁰⁸ Rawles’s My Jim, for example, served as the book selection for a 2009 “Seattle Reads” campaign, which was accompanied by various artistic and cultural events across the city, including the commissioning of a sculpture and quilt inspired by the novel and a speech by the human-rights activist Mende Nazer. ¹⁰⁹ The extent to which minor-character elaboration serves to promote the conservation of literary culture can also be glimpsed in Le Guin’s determination to preserve Virgil’s Latin and in the case of Jon Clinch’s efforts to save Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut. Clinch’s Finn, published by Random House in 2007, tells the story of Huck Finn’s virulently racist Pap. When Clinch discovered that Twain’s house, which nearly bankrupted the latter in his lifetime, was near to closing after a bubble-fueled twenty-million-dollar restoration and museum construction in 2003, he initiated a fundraising campaign led by contemporary authors to save the home. Clinch organized a benefit in September 2008 and a second, glitzier one, featuring the likes of John Grisham, David Baldacci, and Jodi Picoult, held in 2010 at the MGM Grand Casino in Connecticut. ¹¹⁰ It seems fitting that Twain’s home, a symbol of both his own ostentation and the financial strife that dogged him throughout his career, should now be maintained with help of today’s publishing superstars and that Clinch, whose novel successfully leverages Twain’s symbolic capital, should make good on his debts. Minor-character elaboration thus functions in contemporary literary and cultural institutions as both a highly marketable publishing vehicle and a consummate promoter of compromise—reinforcing traditional values as embodied by canonical texts while accommodating demands from the margins and appealing to popular audiences while maintaining reverence for the literary. ¹¹¹

Genre, I have been arguing, functions as a meeting place where the history of literary forms intersects with broader historical movements and with material and institutional relations and routes of circulation. Genre study is compelling because it provokes a number of interlocking questions and sets before us the task of explaining phenomena at several different levels. One can situate individual texts against widely shared generic conventions, analyzing the ways they diverge and interpreting the significance of such departures. Or one can focus on the conventional, investigating the broader social formations that become legible in those shared structures. Or one may choose to highlight the function of a generic form in its institutional contexts, illuminating the actions of various institutional agents and the contested values that shape the fields in which they act. Dimock has made a case for “the function of genre as a point of transit—a kind of switch mechanism—in the reversible hierarchy between the local and the global.”¹¹² Dimock is principally concerned here with a widening purview for the study of American literature, with making connections across time and space and attending to the ways literary networks map unexpected connections between figures working with a genre over centuries and in far-flung locales. But her notion of genre as a “switch mechanism” also captures the way genre study facilitates a shuttling between levels and kinds of literary analysis.

Though the overarching project of Minor Characters Have Their Day is to analyze the way the form, cultural politics, and material channels of production and consumption intersect in genre, the book organizes its subject chronologically. Chapter 1, “Active Readers and Flexible Forms,” fuses formalist analysis with cultural history to trace the emergence of minor-character elaboration to the decolonizing and second-wave feminist movements and the unabashed appropriation of high postmodernism. Though poets and playwrights have long expanded on characters and events from familiar stories, the late 1960s saw a resurgence of the practice, with novelists gravitating to it and paying frequent attention to socially marginal figures. I link the ambivalent reading methods of precursors like C. L. R. James and George Lamming—who both identify with and dissociate themselves from iconic minor characters—with textually acquisitive postmodernists like John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges, to show how the genre surfaces amid a sea change in reading practices. In this period, modes of active, appropriative reading, theorized by Roland Barthes as “writerly” and by feminists such as Adrienne Rich and Judith Fetterley as “re-vision” and “resistant reading,” unapologetically violate New Critical textual boundaries. Reading Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Gardner’s Grendel alongside popular fictions such as Fraser’s Flashman (1969), I show how minor-character elaboration emerges as a variable practice that can be tailored to disparate agendas: critiquing the politics of a canonical predecessor, paying homage to the classic’s humanist values, or generating a series of bawdy, swashbuckling adventures. The more experimental novels of Rhys and Gardner employ ironic, unreliable narrators and fracture conventional forms to approximate fragmented mental states, demonstrating myriad narrative permutations that successors might adapt. Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead poses a potential variation that few heirs will attempt; his play adheres to the New Critical ban on extratextual speculation with parodic extremity, refusing to grant his appropriated characters any traits or experiences beyond those licensed by Hamlet.