outsells literary fiction by a margin that varies between large and enormous.
It has also been excluded from serious critical attention for most of the last century.
The was never argued in full, because it did not need to be.
A category defined by a was assumed to be incapable of the thing that criticism values.
That assumption survives a single badly, and there are many.
Detective fiction has produced formal experiments that a modernist would recognise immediately.
Science fiction has done the sustained thinking about technology that realist fiction largely avoided.
The more interesting question is what the constraint of a form does to a writer.
A that the reader expects becomes a structure against which a writer can work.
Breaking it means something, which is unavailable to a writer whose reader expects nothing in particular.
The sonnet and the murder mystery are the same kind of device at different levels of .
Prestige is the variable that actually moves, and it moves with the audience rather than with the text.
Forms read mainly by women or by the young have been dismissed at a consistent rate across two centuries.
The novel itself occupied that position when it was new and was defended in exactly the terms now used for genre.
Publishing has adapted faster than criticism, as it usually does.
, prizes and review sections have blurred the because the was costing sales.
Academic attention followed the money at the usual interval of about twenty years.
A field that decided what was worth reading now largely describes what people were already reading, which is a smaller role and an honest one.