Genre WAS: That Bloody Man Again

[nrenka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> wrote:

<massive snip>

> Pippin
> wondering what the Faith contingent thinks of Jo's admission that
> she's subverting the fantasy genre
> http://www.quick-quote-quill.org/articles/2005/0705-time-grossman.htm

You mean the same article that has had god know how many people's 
knickers in a twist for its profoundly shallow and inaccurate 
characterization of the current state of the fantasy genre? :)

I wibble, here.  She's writing fantasy in some ways, but she's 
Schiller's naive (rather than sentimental) author, because of her 
indicated lack of knowledge and interest in the genre itself.  That 
she's hit upon some of the common models of fantasy is a combination of 
accident and the fact that the models aren't unique to fantasy.

Of course, Harry Potter is something of a generic mess in and of 
itself.  We've got the background of the British schoolboy story, we've 
got Bildungsroman, and we have particular fantasy elements.  The setup 
for book 7 *could* point towards some of the aspects of epic high 
fantasy (which often has a quest component), but that doesn't sit very 
well with the general tone of 1-6.  Rowling's not writing a detailed 
and separate Secondary World here--half the time the magic is more 
parody, and it's certainly not the kind of deep system-building that 
you get from practitioners of High Fantasy.  And then we got a heavy 
dose of Dickens in HBP, and the ever-present scourge of Jane Austen.

Subverting fantasy?  Hardly.  She'd have to have it dug a lot deeper in 
to do that.  Playing with genre?  Very much so.

-Nora admits that fantasy is her distraction literature of choice, and 
thus knows the genre fairly well--better than the Time writer, for sure