Harriet Evans demystifies our literary snobbery.

People are always surprised to discover that many of my favourite books belong to the much-derided fantasy sub-genre of fiction.  “But,” they exclaim, “you’re an English Literature student – surely that stuff isn’t literature?”

Simply put, it is assumed that “literary” fiction, in the form of the short story, novella or novel, focuses on character, style and psychological depth, while genre or popular fiction is condemned for focusing solely on plot and narrative: creating a page-turner to please the masses.  For some, the idea of students of English Literature enjoying popular fiction more than “literary” fiction can be difficult to believe.

Yet I shouldn’t give people less credit than they deserve: for the majority of people, enjoying genre fiction isn’t anything strange.  What is strange is the insistence that genre fiction can have equal, and indeed, more literary merit than those works we consider u “literature” in the oldest, most traditional sense.

Ever since we were children, my sister and I were encouraged to read anything and everything we could get our hands on: despite growing up amongst the same books, my sister soon developed a preference for books she saw were concerned with “character”, while she couldn’t understand my fascination with those she saw as concerned only with “action”, especially after I began to appreciate poetry and wanted to study English.

Yet she hadn’t read half the “genre” novels that I had, and what she didn’t realise was that there was often more to a fantasy novel, for example, than simply good vs evil and other clichéd stereotypes.  Of course, many was the time when I got halfway through the first chapter of a genre novel and thought to myself, okay, this is ridiculous – but for every one of these there were two that meant something more than simple plot.

Myths were the first stories, allegories of the goings-on in the universe around us, and genre fiction is arguably the natural evolution of these.  Myths unify shared perspectives, values and history, but most importantly, literature. Communal tales connect us to one another and to our surrounding environment, and the thread of communal themes connects us to other cultures, too. Yet somewhere along the line we decided to relegate a lower position in our culture for such stories, instead hailing stylistic marvels and the character-depth of “literary” fiction.

Despite this, it is common to find depth of character in fantasy and other genre novels – how else could they continue to be so popular?  We’ve created the conflicted villain, the doubtful hero, a female character that isn’t just a flakey love interest blown about passively by ‘fate’, and often an unconventional ending that leaves the reader surprised, bewildered even, just as much as any “literary” novel can.

But plot is also essential – as the creators of our myths knew.  I once read that there are six universal plot systems: these included scenarios such as, “man vs nature”, “man vs woman”… and then “Proust” – where nothing actually happens.

This reflects the drawback to so-called “literary” fiction: it may be the most amazingly written, most interestingly styled and most psychologically plausible book in the world – but if nothing happens, it cannot tell us anything about ourselves: unless something happens in the novel, however small or insignificant, to change the character and the reader, it cannot be considered worth reading.

Here I must mention a book – ironically, not one of my favourites, but one that I think shows the combination of plot and character, genre and “literary”, remarkably well.  The Ten Thousand, a fantasy novel by Paul Kearney, published by Solaris is an admirable work.  On the surface, the novel looks simply to be a story of war and politics in a fantastical world.  There are historical references to ancient Greece and Persia, but even these are not enough to make the work stand out as anything special in a market flooded by similar works.  The final scenes are what give it its complexity and depth: they shattered all my preconceptions of the fantasy genre and showed me something new – that just because a novel may look and read like “paraliterature”, there’s no reason why it can’t think like literature.

I am of the firm belief that there is no simple divide between works concerned with “how you write”(literary) and “what you write” (genre).  I don’t think it’s possible for a successful book to be wholly one or the other, and so I don’t think there is any reason why the study of English Literature students should be excluded from all interesting and provoking works of fiction – regardless of their labelling.

John Updike, an American writer of so-called “literary fiction”, quashed the “literary” elitism used to pigeonhole his work by stating that he believed all his works, and therefore the works of every writer, to be literary: because “they are written in words”.  And we can’t really argue with that, can we?