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Minor Characters Have Their Day - Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace (Hardcover)
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Minor Characters Have Their Day - Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace (Hardcover)
Series: Literature Now
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How do genres develop? In what ways do they reflect changing
political and cultural trends? What do they tell us about the
motivations of publishers and readers? Combining close readings and
formal analysis with a sociology of literary institutions and
markets, Minor Characters Have Their Day offers a compelling new
approach to genre study and contemporary fiction. Focusing on the
booming genre of books that transform minor characters from
canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new works, Jeremy
Rosen makes broader claims about the state of contemporary fiction,
the strategies of the publishing industry over recent decades, and
the function of literary characters. Rosen traces the recent surge
in "minor-character elaboration" to the late 1960s and works such
as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead. These early examples often recover the
voices of marginalized individuals and groups. As the genre has
exploded between the 1980s and the present, with novels about
Ahab's wife, Huck Finn's father, and Mr. Dalloway, it has begun to
embody the neoliberal commitments of subjective experience,
individual expression, and agency. Eventually, large-scale
publishers capitalized on the genre as a way to appeal to educated
audiences aware of the prestige of the classics and to draw in
identity-based niche markets. Rosen's conclusion ties the
understudied evolution of minor-character elaboration to the theory
of literary character.
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