Re the discussion in Friday's coffee on genre there is a great article about Chit Lit by JoannaTrollopehere. It's great to see someone stand up for women's fiction in general and specifically for chick lit or better said wit lit!
After careful consideration, I'm of the opinion that "genre" and "quality" could be plotted on two orthogonal axes. In other words, any book could be judged and marked as a point anywhere on such a graph. For me there is no correlation, implied or real, between genre and quality. The only thing genre seems to do is to constrain the type of plot/story/setting that gets written.
Snubbing books because of their genre is therefore bad logic and wrong. Snub a book because it's badly written, or you just plain didn't like it; not because of which shelf it came from in the shop.
4 comments:
Oh! That was worth reading :) Thanks for the link, Liz.
After careful consideration, I'm of the opinion that "genre" and "quality" could be plotted on two orthogonal axes. In other words, any book could be judged and marked as a point anywhere on such a graph. For me there is no correlation, implied or real, between genre and quality. The only thing genre seems to do is to constrain the type of plot/story/setting that gets written.
Snubbing books because of their genre is therefore bad logic and wrong. Snub a book because it's badly written, or you just plain didn't like it; not because of which shelf it came from in the shop.
Yours, happy-to-walk-around-with-a-pink-book,
CB.
Thank god I can now say I'm writing 'Wit Lit'!
I love 'Wit Lit' and am glad to read someone being positive about the genre for once. Good for her.
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