Literature–Mainstream vs. Genre

This is going to be another continuing topic, although I don’t know how frequent it will be. The focus here is not “literature” in general, but “Literature”. It may not seem like a large difference, but in academic circles especially, trying to decide what books possess a certain kind of quality which makes them deserve that capital “L” is a fairly hot topic. In these posts, I will look at attempts I have seen people have made to separate out Literature from other writing, and I want to start with one of the more widespread divisions, the distinction between mainstream literature and genre literature.

Some people might disagree with me on this, but I think that this distinction is based on content and setting more than anything else. Mainstream works are those which take place in the real world that we inhabit. They contain characters that we could conceivably meet, and who abide by the same basic rules of existence that we do. Genre fiction, in many of its forms, breaks this rule by creating characters and worlds which do not abide by the rules of our world. This content might break physical or technological laws (like magic, advanced artificial intelligence and faster than light travel) as well as social rules, (like the sexual stereotypes in romance novels). Not all genres break all of these rules, but they do break some rule. The result is characters that could not exist in our world, by the very nature of their existence.