Minor Characters Have Their Day is a book about genre and a case study of a booming contemporary genre. It attempts to explain how genres work, what defines them—form? content? a particular publishing niche?—how they emerge and develop, what they reveal about the cultural moment at which they flourish and about the literary, cultural, and commercial institutions and networks through which they circulate. The book draws its insights about genre through the focused analysis of a particular genre that has flourished since the late 1960s and become particularly visible since the late 1990s. These insights may not apply universally, to all genres. Like the varied array of texts that deploy a given genre, genres share some characteristics while diverging from one another in other ways. But since this book argues that genres are by their nature variable, adaptable technologies rather than rule-bound categories, the fact that genres differ from one another is fully compatible with the general theory offered here.
Minor Characters Have Their Day understands genre as a dynamic kind of textual and rhetorical practice with a real historical existence that must be analyzed along several intersecting axes. The most familiar of these axes of inquiry, for today’s literary scholars, considers the cultural work of genre. The idea here is that a genre’s conventional form and thematic preoccupations make legible the social and political concerns of the historical moment at which that genre flourishes. The cultural politics of genre cannot be neatly separated, however, from the formal and institutional pressures that give genres their shapes. A genre becomes visible as such when a succession of producers plays out a set of formal possibilities. This process of formal iteration is never simply reiteration. The riffing on a form that constitutes a genre is also what generates its internal variation and thus the permeable boundaries of generic categories. How much modification of an inherited form can occur before we detect the presence of a new genre? The recent vogue of quantitative literary scholarship abjures such questions, ignoring the internal heterogeneity and porous borders of actual genres, the fact that they are defined by a combination of similarity and difference, stability and dynamism. Furthermore, formal experimentation does not occur in a vacuum. Perhaps the most important argument of Minor Characters Have Their Day emerges out of my insistence that we cannot apprehend the full social and cultural implications of genre, the function of form, without taking into account the commercial and symbolic economies through which genres circulate. Writers adopt genres because they provide existing forms that can be adapted to particular purposes but also because those genres serve strategic functions in a competitive literary field. Publishers seize on a genre and spur its production according to their perception of the readership for such texts and also because those publishers are subject to economic pressures from parent companies and responsive to broader cultural and marketplace transformations. Genre subsists, then, at the nexus of form, cultural history, and material conditions of production and consumption.
The introduction to this book undertakes two considerable tasks—and is, as a result, a considerable length for an introduction. It argues that genre needs to be studied along the three intersecting axes traced above, and it introduces readers to some principal characteristics and representative texts of a genre, about which they might have only an intuitive awareness. Attempting to draw a general theory of genre study and acquaint readers with a genre that they will immediately start noticing everywhere in the popular literary landscape, the introduction lays down a methodological framework that the subsequent chapters apply to the genre I have dubbed “minor-character elaboration.”