How come nonsense literature (Alice in Wonderland etc) didn’t thrive as a genre, but science fiction and modern fantasy/horror, born around the same period, did?
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Hmm the OG of all Industrial Age genre fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, had elements of at least 3 distinct later genres: sf, horror, fantasy (via zombies).
I’m fascinated by genre fiction, it interests me way more than literary fiction.
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Hmm that’s not quite nonsense though. More like surrealist literary fantasy.
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High modernism is a literary genre though not pulp. I’d sub romance instead.
X: Formalist vs Romantic
Y: Intellectual vs Emotional
FI: nonsense
FE: Mystery
RI: Sci-fi/fantasy
RE: Romance
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in the west? because the west is inherently violent, early sci-fi books were just militaristic wank off sessions largely speaking
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The history of novels is a history of further separation from reality. First there was stuff like sci fi. Then there was entire worlds separate from our own. We’re getting closer to acceptance of nonsense literature as serious.
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Well there’s absurdist fiction — Godot, The Rhinoceros, stuff like that. Mainly theater.
I don’t know who likes that stuff, but it was a literary genre, at least for a while.
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I see a straight line from Alice to Narnia to Harry Potter. Not sure what you think disappeared.
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