genre theory and marketing categories

[truepenny]

rliz and I have gotten into a discussion of genre fiction (here and here), which has led me to think it's time to put down coherently some things I've been saying, in isolated patches to various people for several months, if not years, about genre theory and marketing categories.


I am not, as I may have remarked before, much of a theory head. But I do love genre theory and use it as much in my fiction-writing life as I do in my graduate-student life. My take on it is idiosyncratic, and is a mélange of ideas from sources I no longer remember. But it goes something like this:

A genre is defined by its conventions. These conventions are not things that must happen, attitudes that must be struck, or meters that must be adhered to. Rather, they are a series of questions which the text poses/is posed, and the relationship of a work to a genre is defined by the ways in which it answers those questions, Yes, No, or Giraffe!. Genres are also things whose definitions (and the definition of "genre" as a category) change over time, so that, for example, in the Renaissance in England, there were three genres: prose, poetry, and drama. Poetry was the only one really worthy of notice, though gentlemen might amuse themselves with prose, and not-quite-gentlemen might make quite a decent living off drama. Notice that while the categories are nothing like the ones we have today, the value-judgment built into them is pretty much the same. Some genres are deemed worthwhile and some aren't. In classical Rome, the worthy genre was epic, while elegy was pure frivolity. Ovid was considered a hack in his own day. So was Shakespeare. I'm not going to talk about poetry in what follows, because it has become rather exaggeratedly a thing-unto-itself, and because my primary interest is in what happens to fiction when it encounters this system.

On the other hand, we have marketing categories. These are not the same as genres, although the publishing industry, the academy, and the critical establishment have shown a distressing inclination to let the two conflate. Marketing categories are all about value judgments, and that has fed back into the way genre gets discussed and defined in this, the dawn of a brave new century.

Let me explain what I mean (as best I can). Marketing categories are a way for people to find the sort of books they want quickly. Actually, I applaud this impulse, since that is, after all, the whole point of a bookstore. So books are grouped together by features which someone, somewhere along the line (and I don't know enough about the history of publishing and marketing to know whom or when), decided were sufficiently distinctive markers: SF/F, Romance, Western, Mystery/Suspense, Literature/Fiction. In some bookstores, Horror is its own category. In some, it's lumped in with Literature/Fiction; in some, it's lumped in with SF/F. And in some, most confusingly, some Horror is Literature/Fiction and some is SF/F, thus ensuring that someone trying to find, for instance Caitlín R. Kiernan's work is reduced to sheer guesswork as to which section to try first.

That one example demonstrates most of what's wrong in assuming that marketing categories and genres exist in a one-to-one correspondence, and also why marketing categories are so frustrating. Marketing categories are prescriptive; they are imposed on books, insisting that square, triangular, and trapezoidal pegs be fit into the same round hole. Genre theory, when properly applied, should be descriptive. If we ask these questions, what answers does this particular text give us?

I realize that those of you not brainwashed and indoctrinated into the cult of academic hermeneutics may now be wondering what good genre theory does anybody, if all it does is sort books into categories that don't matter to anyone. There's a couple ways to think about it. One is that it's fun. For example, if you read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose with genre theory in mind, or even a theoretical awareness of the genre of mystery, you notice that in fact the detective fails to solve the mystery and Eco is in fact playing a number of games with the genre of mystery. Books that retell fairy-tales, in all the myriad ways that project can be undertaken, are, in a sense, using genre theory. It's our knowledge of the genre of fairy-tales, the ways in which our expectations have been shaped by the conventions of the genre, that enable us to appreciate the cleverness of Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch or Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber.

Or, to take an example near to my own heart (and possibly to show how genre theory can be useful in increasing one's understanding of a text), let's look at Hamlet. I have a 40 page chapter about Hamlet and genre, but let me just point out one thing here. Hamlet is a revenge tragedy; we all know that. But if you look at the action in Hamlet, you notice that the revenge--the thing that makes it a revenge tragedy--is absolutely the last action in the play. Everyone else who dies is killed before Claudius, including Hamlet himself (the poison takes a little while to kill him, but he's a walking dead man when he finally achieves his revenge). And the play wanders remarkably freely for an ostensible revenge tragedy; we've got Hamlet's relationship with Ophelia, with Gertrude, with Horatio, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, the players, Fortinbras skulking around the edges, pirates, gravediggers .... My argument about Hamlet is essentially that it's the rubric of revenge tragedy being imposed on a play that has a great many other interests, and the characters who die represent other genres being summarily disposed of. Genre theory provides, then, a different way to think about why Hamlet is the play it is.

And genre theory offers, also, a way to get outside marketing categories and begin to understand what's wrong with them. As I said to Rliz, the problem with the marketing definition of "genre fiction" is that it commits a crashing category error. It conflates genres defined by plot (romance, mystery) with "genres" defined by rather nebulous aspects of setting. If you've ever been witness to or participant in one of those endless arguments about defining science fiction vs. fantasy vs. horror, you'll know what I mean. And the marketing definition contrasts these "genres" with an equally nebulously defined genre, "literary" or "mainstream" fiction, as if there's a mutual exclusion clause in effect. (There's also an arrogant false premise in calling realistic fiction the "mainstream"; as Tom Shippey points out in J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, if you look at the numbers, "mainstream" fiction ain't.)

A moment's thought is enough to dispel the argument that "genre fiction" can't be "literary." Without getting into contention about contemporary authors, let's look at the literature in the established canon, starting with, oh, gosh, Beowulf. Fantasy. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Fantasy. (I'm leaving out allegory, because you can argue about how fantastical it's meant to be, but a case can be made for the Divine Comedy, Piers Plowman, Pilgrim's Progress, Utopia all as fantasy.) The Faerie Queene. Fantasy (or, as a question on my MA exam hypothesized, SF). A Midsummer Night's Dream. Fantasy. Macbeth. Horror. Frankenstein. Horror or SF, depending on how you want to read it. The Turn of the Screw. Horror. (Other examples may be adduced at the discretion of the reader.) It's true that much of modern sf/f/h is crap, but then it's also true that Sturgeon's Law always pertains: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of "literary" fiction is also crap. The trouble is that somehow, the representative texts of "literary" fiction are the best, whereas the representative texts of "genre" fiction somehow always end up being the worst, or the most commercial, or the most derivative. Star Trek novels (which vary wildly in quality from novel to novel, but which are all one-down on the literary totem pole, thanks to their origin in a TV show), or the endless liverwurst produced by Terry Brooks, or the pulp novels of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. And "literary" authors who write genre fiction either deny strenuously that it's genre fiction (Atwood, James), or, because they are literary authors, have critics to deny it for them. Joyce Carol Oates (whose work I dislike, btw) is a stellar example. Atwood's even tried to deny genre status on behalf of Le Guin, whereas Le Guin has always been very vocal and assertive about her place within the science fiction genre.

Properly applied, genre theory does an end-run around value judgment. You can talk about how well or badly a novel handles its particular choices, but you don't have to (or oughtn't to) talk about the validity of the choices it has chosen to pose itself. Genre theory, for instance, would enable one to say some very interesting things about Swordspoint and the choices it makes; having accepted the broad markers of fantasy (secondary world, semi-Renaissance culture), it yet refuses magic, monarchy, and a number of other conventions of its chosen genre. And those choices in turn inflect and influence the kind of story the novel tells and the kind of characters who inhabit it. Swordspoint's brilliance as a novel has nothing to do with its marketing category and much (though not everything) to do with its genre.

I seriously doubt we'll ever get rid of marketing categories. As I said way back at the beginning of this phenomenally long post, marketing categories have value; they make the reader's search for a book to read slightly easier, and that's always a good thing. What I object to, and will go on objecting to, most likely at the top of my voice, is the way in which marketing categories have usurped the careful distinctions of genre theory and, even more appallingly, the way they have been mapped onto value-judgments in a way that allows books to be dismissed (as mere pulp, or "not valid," as a long-ago creative writing teacher of mine put it), not on their own merits, but on their packaging.

Comments

[ex-mommybir.livejournal.com]

As someone who writes sf/f erotica, I find this a very interesting post. I've saved it to my memories and am going to carry it away into a corner and ponder it.

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

Very interesting post. Also reminds me how crazymaking it is to walk into chain bookstores that insist on arbitrarily cordoning off "Fiction" from "Literature."

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I once heard this question raised at an academic conference, and John Kessel said, "Fiction is by people who are still alive."

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

So what are the questions that a text poses -- or the answers it offers -- to be defined SF, fantasy, or literary fiction? What about Swordspoint's responses makes it fantasy rather than literary fiction?

How does separating out marketing category and genre make sense of the distinction between plot-defined "genres" (romance, mystery) and setting-defined ones (fantasy, sf, mainstream)?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Argh. There's a reason I stopped where I did, and it's because I haven't thrashed all those things out yet.

Answering the second one (because answering the first one would take (a.) years of intensive study and thought or (b.) being John Clute), I think the difference is that sf/f/h actually has gross disservices done to it by being lumped into genres. There are all kinds of ways you can proceed from the initial concept of a world with something impossible in it (yes, this is a fast and loose definition of what sf/f/h is, but it is what they have in common). Swordspoint, The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, and The Anubis Gates (to choose things that are all "fantasy") have similarities in plot structure only insofar as ALL narratives have similarities. Whereas mysteries and romances have certain plot things that either have to happen, or have to definitively NOT happen (and sorry for that egregiously split infinitive). They are genres in the genre theory sense (and most of Barbara Hambly's fantasies also belong in the mystery and romance genres, because they have those plot markers).

It's hard to do the paradigm shift work necessary to move from "these categories are inadequate" to what better categories would be. I don't, at the moment, have any answers about that.

The other phrase that's likely to come up here is "genre sensibility." I'm not quite sure what that is, and I'd love it if someone could define it for me. Is it what oracne's talking about with the heightened emotion? Is it a way of writing about the world of the novel? I don't know.

And I think Swordspoint is literary fiction. It's literary fiction in a fantasy setting.

And now I suppose you're going to want me to tell you what "literary fiction" is. :) That's about prose style, and the narrative's attitude toward its own narration, and is probably another post all by itself.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

And now I suppose you're going to want me to tell you what "literary fiction" is. :)

Yup. :)

I will try to think about this some more this weekend. The problem I'm having is that what you say seems very sensible and clear-headed, and then I try to apply it to the categorization and analysis of texts, and I'm lost. Which is probably me and not you.

I'm also not sure horror actually has to have something impossible in it. Take Shirley Jackson, for example. The Haunting of Hill House and The Sundial, I guess you could say are ... haunted? inflected? by the possibility of the impossibile; but We Have Always Lived in the Castle and "The Lottery" have no supernatural aspects at all, and seem to me no less and no more horror.

[inkylj.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's correct to call sf/fantasy setting-defined genres. Obviously some rely heavily on the setting but others are really focused on the idea and the setting only comes up as it interacts with the idea: "what if a time machine gets discovered?" "what if a farmboy is destined to save the world?" "what if radioactive waste gives an art critic an allergy to art?"

And, right, each of those ideas has questions associated with it. The ones that count as genres -- time travel, epic fantasy, whatever -- have been done enough to have a host of standard questions that define the (sub)genre: "what if the time-traveller tries to change their own past?", "who will be the lovable sidekick of the farmboy with a destiny?". Mainstream authors that try and do genre pieces tend to fall down because they copy the cliches but not the questions that they're addressing, or answer the questions in a way that shows they don't have any idea that they've been answered before.

I guess there are broader questions that cover a range of subgenres but they aren't usually detailed enough to be interesting: "what is people's reaction to the thing," "how does the person find out about the thing", and, ultimately, "what is the new thing?"

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Since genre is something I am struggling with right now, I'm glad you posted this.

A genre is defined by its conventions. These conventions are not things that must happen, attitudes that must be struck, or meters that must be adhered to. Rather, they are a series of questions which the text poses/is posed, and the relationship of a work to a genre is defined by the ways in which it answers those questions, Yes, No, or Giraffe!.

Giraffe! I love it! I have fuzzy giraffe stickers on my blue plastic floppy disk case, but you couldn't have known that...

More seriously, I was just thinking about why my novel (it all comes back to that for me, at the moment) is genre and not mainstream. Its fantasy element is small and isn't going to have a huge impact on the plot. The romance doesn't rule the plot, though it is a large part of it.

My idea is linked to your about questions asked and answered. For example my novel is, I think, answering questions about how characters would react to a given situation. In genre, it's allowable to show more intense emotion, even to exaggerate it. I'm taking advantage of that. I'm deliberately, as my friend Ann said, "pushing all the buttons" and I'm considering that a valid way of presenting my story. Is that sort of what you mean?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Being in-between genres is good, too. The goal is not to have a taxonomy into which every pinned and mounted dragonfly fits, but to build a critical language to talk about why certain stories behave the way they do.

I think, if I'm understanding you correctly, that the kinds of questions you're asking (about character reaction) are more plot-questions than genre-questions. The genre-questions go more with the REASONS for the situation. Is your hero really seeing ghosts, or is he crazy? [y | n | giraffe!] If he's really seeing ghosts, then it's one kind of novel; if he's crazy, then it's another. If the answer is giraffe!, then probably you are Thomas Pynchon, and why haven't you mentioned THAT before? :)

Does that make my meaning any clearer?

[se-parsons.livejournal.com]

Dude.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - a boy coming-of-age, social satire, polemic against a number of peeves of the author, fantasy with exaggerated characters, comedy?

Bleak House - delusional narrator vs. omniscent narrator, spontaneous human combustion as a major plot point, social satire, social realism, embedded philosophic musings, exaggerated characters again.

It - violates the genre convention of horror in this journal by the fact that is IS the actions of the characters that matter and that what they do is what saves them. And the scary thing isn't supernatural in origin. So is it fantasy/horror, seeing the kids work magic, or SF/horror because the bad guy is from outer space? Or does it just ignore all that and do what it needs to do as a story.

It is fun to pick ourselves apart and categorize things, but just this sort of worrying about marketing (which is my day job) is what has kept me from writing or trying to sell anything for some years now because my last thing defied genre and didn't sell. It's the kind of thing that crushes the spirit of a writer and turns them into a genre-slave hack.

Even if we don't sell, we still need to forget the catagories EXCEPT for the part about what questions is the text asking of itself and how are they being answered or not? Because that is just plain good writing and is something a writer needs to be mindful of. If we answer the questions in a stupid or boring or cheap way, we write a bad book (that other writers will apologize for if we're Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates) - unless you're one of the guys above and you still manage to pull it out anyway because there's a lot of other stuff going on that detracts from the stuff that sucks or is cheap.

I am the lowbrow in this discussion despite the grad school, but if you think too hard about this, you can easily kill your own creativity by worrying about what everyone else has done or hasn't done and how it's been marketed and critically received.

Writing the story is your job. Categorizing and marketing the story is the job of your agent or some hack writer like me working for a publishing company. And then, finally, after it's published and deemed worthy of study, academics who will publish papers about it to get tenure.

If you worry too much about their jobs, you will probably mess up your own is all I'm saying.

[hedda62.livejournal.com]

*cheers*

I wish I had time to discuss lots of aspects of this, but I'll comment briefly on this:

The trouble is that somehow, the representative texts of "literary" fiction are the best, whereas the representative texts of "genre" fiction somehow always end up being the worst, or the most commercial, or the most derivative.

I'm not sure the representative texts of "genre" fiction are carved in stone in quite the same way that the others are; it seems to depend on who you ask. Certainly the crap ones are marketed the most heavily, but that's true of popular realistic fiction too, and if you ask someone who knows a particular "genre" category well for recommendations, they'll give you the good ones. (Which is why I have such a long TBR list.) And that does sometimes include people who work in bookstores, but not, I suspect, people who design and manage bookstore chains.

There should also be a category for those books that are discussed and even marketed as "science fiction for people who don't like science fiction" or "a mystery novel for the intellectual" and so forth. Ducking the issue, I call it.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure the representative texts of "genre" fiction are carved in stone in quite the same way that the others are; it seems to depend on who you ask

I'd say that it is, alas, true that the representative texts of SF among those who do not read SF make up a much larger proportion of the commerical and the derivative than the represnetative texts of "literature" among those who do not read that.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

There should also be a category for those books that are discussed and even marketed as "science fiction for people who don't like science fiction" or "a mystery novel for the intellectual"

Ah, you mean Snoblit.

[ionas.livejournal.com]

Swordspoint, to me, fits squarely in genre boundaries because it shares genre elements such as wish-fulfilment (Richard and Alec are 'Mary Sue' protagonists in exactly the same way that Lymond is a 'Mary Sue'--and probably were inspired by him), protagonists who change things, a mixture of world-as-I-wish-it-was and world-as-it-is.

There is a discussion that might or might not be tangential going on over in my own journal, if you have the time to waste in perusal.


That said, I'd ben interested to see where you fit the works of John Crowley.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I, personally, am very very leery about labelling characters as Mary Sues. I agree that Richard and Alec are highly romanticized and Byronic (but that's because they are children of a highly romanticized and Byronic world), but I don't think Ellen Kushner is silly enough to want to BE either of them.

And wish-fulfillment isn't a marker of fantasy, anyway. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, much as I loathe them, are fantasy, but not by any definition wish-fulfillment. Wish-fulfillment is a characteristic of the term I just coined up-thread: pararealistic, i.e., like real life only better. I think you can have pararealistic fantasy (Mercedes Lackey springs to mind), but the two ideas are not coterminous.

John Crowley definitely falls under Giraffe! :)

I've only read Little, Big, because I cannot get through any of his other books for love nor money. And Little Big is literary fantasy. High quality, self-reflective prose and a fantastic-enabled world.

It looks so misleadingly tidy when I put it that way.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

In terms of marketing category rather than genre (perhaps. Or perhaps it is a version of genre) sometimes one could wish that 'general fiction' could be a bit more broken down so that one had a better idea of what one might getting on those shelves. I suppose publishers do this to some extent by packaging (e.g. chick-lit in pastels).

There's a secondhand bookseller in the novelisation by Simon Brett of his radio serial 'After Henry' who labels his shelves things like 'big fat sagas that are actually worth reading' and 'books that used to be scandalous' and other idiosyncratic but perfectly logical and useful labellings that I've forgotten. Possibly 'male midlife crisis novels' 'bored wife has an affair novels'?

The issue of generic themes in litfict is seldom addressed, as I may have said before. And are often used much less consciously and subversively than generic themes in genre fiction.

[marith.livejournal.com]

Argh. No time...must...resist... But these discussions are always fascinating.

I am not, as I may have remarked before, much of a theory head.

I look SO dubious. This is me, over here, looking dubious. :)


Interesting. I agree about marketing categories being necessary but inadequate, but am not so sure about questions as an organizing principle. (What questions does _Swordspoint_ ask?)

The "novum" definition of SF makes sense. My nebulous definition at present is: "Take the world as you-the-author know it. Add or change a small number of elements in present, future or past; obey the laws of physics as presently understood, though you can posit future discoveries. Observe the effect of your changes. "

Horror assumes a malevolent universe, yah. Possibly it also assumes that the universe is fundamentally unknowable, and that people are by and large helpless (even if the protagonists in the story beat back this particular threat). If the universe is mechanistic and people are helpless, it's more of a dystopia. If the universe is benign, then it's kind of fantasy by default, isn't it?

*makes self stop rambling and get back to work now*

[cofax7]

Possibly it also assumes that the universe is fundamentally unknowable, and that people are by and large helpless (even if the protagonists in the story beat back this particular threat).

Yes, like that. I think.

I don't read much horror (I have a fairly low tolerance for gore and suspense-ending-badly), but I read Caitlin Kiernan's Threshold on a recommendation. It was definitely horror, and yet when I tried to explain why it was horror and not dark fantasy (and could someone explain the distinction there, pretty please? Is it genre or marketing category?), I ended up coming back only to the fact that, though the characters survived, nobody understood what had happened. The malevolent force was fundamentally unknowable, and the survival by the characters had less to do with outthinking it than simply evading it.

I haven't read enough horror to know that this is true across the board, but certainly the fear of the unknown and, more importantly, the malevolence of the unknowable, seem to be a fundamental element of the genre.

Just a few thoughts...

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think genre imposes certain expectations, which are your questions, but I think that with it certain odd and unexpected things such as pacing and style of incluing. (Incluing means the way you insert things into the story. So in romance you stop to describe the heroine, in SF you slide in the fact of coming back from a 197th birthday party to inclue the fact that there are longevity treatments, in fantasy you say "blue magic" and trust the reader to hold that name until you put some more information with it.)

When you read SF or fantasy that's been written by someone who doesn't read in genre, the pacing and the incluing are almost always screwed up.

In this way, it makes perfect sense for me to consider poetry a genre -- in fact, I do, I have been known to say when people are discussing SF poetry that poetry is its own genre. Poetry asks its own questions, it has its own demands about pacing and incluing.

I have a much longer and probably less coherent thing about pacing and genre which I posted on rasfc and can almost certainly be easily found on google groups.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

When you read SF or fantasy that's been written by someone who doesn't read in genre, the pacing and the incluing are almost always screwed up.

Sometimes the incluing is bent on purpose, no? I taught Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber once; the kids who'd read sf before found its trappings deeply problematic because Hopkinson didn't play to their expectations of genre, whereas the other kids said, "Oh, abuse and revenge and coming-of-age." I can't think how else one'd classify MR besides sf, though.

Am not attempting to suggest that Hopkinson doesn't read in genre, btw (her ambiguous author's note notwithstanding). Your sentence just triggered a mild tangent.

[rliz.livejournal.com]

> And in some, most confusingly, some Horror is Literature/Fiction and some is SF/F, thus ensuring that someone trying to find, for instance Caitlín R. Kiernan's work is reduced to sheer guesswork as to which section to try first.

The Borders in my neighborhood is like with the gay section as well, but it's really easy to see the algorithm they used to determine their particular shelving stylah. Emma Donoghue, for example: Hood and Stir-Fry are in the back-of-the-store lesbian ghetto, next to Naiad Press romances and lesbian murder mysteries, while The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, her most recent work, which has heterosexual content, sits under the D in fiction. My (incredibly incredibly objective) personal opinion is that Stir-Fry and Hood are better than Rabbits, but the idly-browsing regular customer won't ever see them. (This is kind of an old outrage. Two years ago I had half of an angry letter composed.)

For the C.R.K. question, I suppose you'd have to know what the current-edition cover design of her novels looks like. ...

In other news, anyway: I want to grow up to be you.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

*blushes*
Thank you.

The whole ghetto-izing of gay & lesbian texts (and the definitions of gay & lesbian texts) actually just baffles me, and I don't know enough about that sub-field of literature to even begin to TRY to parse it.

I can't help seeing it as a covert enforcement of a Puritanical moral code (two women kissing each other! we can't put this where people might find it by accident! *gasp*), rather than a useful definitional structure of any kind. Or does the stuff that gets grouped together that way actually have generic markers (aside from gay and/or lesbian characters, that is) to justify the segregation?

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I thought I wasn't interested in genre theory. Silly me. This is quite a lot of food for thought.

Quibbles and thoughts

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Beowulf wasn't fantasy when it was written (set down from oral telling?) If the writer/teller and the audience agrees that magic is real, then the presence of magic doesn't make the work fantasy. (Unless, of course, the magic is of a kind Everyone Knows doesn't exist/work).

There are mysteries which contradict genre expectations, but are still mysteries: Joyce Porter's Inspector Dover series. Dover's goal in a homicide investigation is to pin the murder on someone, and get the work over with. He does solve about half his cases, by chance.

Re: Quibbles and thoughts

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Beowulf is actually a really complicated artifact. It's a pre-Christian oral epic being written down by a Christian monk, and I'd actually argue that the monk himself probably doesn't believe that Grendel and Grendel's mum and the dragon are or were ever real. What the Anglo-Saxon people who told and listened to it believed is something I'm not qualified to get into. I was describing it as fantasy (a.) loosely, (b.) anachronistically, (c.) from the viewpoint of the monk rather than the original tellers. There's a whole 'nother question there about fiction and history and Bede and Tacitus, which my brain isn't strong enough to go into.

I've read one of the Dover books and just hated it, mostly because I don't find that kind of humor even remotely funny. But, yes, the theory of genre conventions off of which I'm working isn't that they're rules one has to abide by. Porter couldn't bounce off the genre the way she does if there weren't conventions to bounce off of, if there weren't those questions that she could answer in a deliberately off-the-wall way.