Active Readers and Flexible Forms

Traces the recent surge in minor-character elaboration to the late 1960s and a set of active reading practices and textual acquisitiveness shared by feminist, anticolonial, poststructuralist, and postmodernist writers. It argues that early forays into the genre by writers like Jean Rhys, John Gardner, and Tom Stoppard reveal a variety of formal permutations and agendas that later writers might inherit.

Three Axes of Genre Study

Derives a general theory of genre from analysis of the genre I call “minor-character elaboration.” It argues that genre should be studied and understood along three intersecting axes: as a practice of formal reiteration and variation, as a shared social practice that conveys the cultural logic of a particular historical moment, and as a technology that is deployed to serve the strategic needs of producers and consumers.

Genre as Telescopic Method

One of the virtues, indeed the pleasures, of genre study is the fact that it allows for telescoping between levels of analysis. Genre study endeavors like much historicist and sociological literary scholarship to tease out the relations between literary forms and broader social and cultural phenomena. This book has argued for a triple-stranded approach to studying genre, as it sits at the intersection of form, history, and the workings of social institutions. Analyzing the variations on the formula or recipe that constitute a genre aims to elucidate the transformations and adaptability of a literary form. The conventions that appear across a cross-section of a genre communicate a common set of assumptions, a shared social logic that helps explain why a succession of writers gravitate to a generic technique at a particular historical moment. And genres serve institutional and marketplace functions, helping producers target audiences and gain strategic advantages in the market, and providing satisfactions for readers. But because any text that utilizes a genre shares features with a wider corpus of texts while departing from them in other ways, genre study allows scholars to strive for claims about a genre’s greater social significance while remaining sensitive to the innovative or idiosyncratic features of individual texts. Genre, that is, appeals to the scholar who wants to reach for the breadth of social significance without abandoning the nuance of close reading. One can zoom in on a novel such as ...

The Logic of Characters’ Virtual Lives

Argues that writers of minor-character elaboration foreground a tension between structural and referential views of character that has dominated theories and scholarly debates surrounding literary character. The chapter argues that authors who adopt the genre reveals how reference is produced by readers’ supplementing textual structure with outside information, a process that is both central to realist reading practices and, when extended, produces characters’ virtual lives.

“An Insatiable Market” For Minor Characters

Argues that minor-character elaboration has flourished because it serves the strategic needs of producers in the consolidated global publishing industry. Genre fiction appeals to large-scale publishers because it minimizes risk by deploying proven formulae and aiming at established audiences. Minor-character elaboration adds to this several particular qualities. It allows producers to annex the prestige of the traditional literary canon while assimilating the perspectives of female and minority subjects, and so appeal to an educated, well-read demographic, as well as identity-groups that are reconceived as target publics.

The Real and Imaginary Politics of Minor-Character Elaboration, 1983–2014

Argues that the conventional form of minor-character elaboration, which becomes visible as the genre flourishes between the 1980s and the present, articulates a set of consensus values of liberal pluralism. Reading a wide range of texts produced in this period, the chapter shows how the registering of the narrative voice and psychology of a formerly minor character becomes the genre’s primary convention. While scholars have often lauded such texts for liberating the voices, of minor characters, I argue that rather than accomplishing an emancipation or posing a subversive challenge, the genre reaffirms the unique subjective experience of every individual, and the necessity of a pluralist dialogue between conflicting agendas.