Abstract:

Though genre fiction is now ubiquitous, and though both book history and literary studies have devoted considerable attention to individual genres like science fiction and romance novels, the history of the system of popular fiction categories has been little studied. This essay traces the origins of the genre-fiction system in United States magazine and book publishing, bringing sociological and book-historical analysis to bear on changing practices of categorization in publishing, advertising, librarianship, and reader response from the 1890s through the 1950s. Genre categories were only intermittently in use through the 1910s; they were first institutionalized in pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. The genre-fiction system was transmitted to book publishing only in the course of the so-called "paperback revolution" of the 1940s and 1950s, which made room for fiction-book production by categories while relegating it to a permanently low-status position. This transmission across publishing formats was far from deliberate; instead, the essay argues, the system of genre fiction arose and endured as a stable compromise articulating an expanded fiction-reading public to an expansive print culture industry, making new readers and new fiction---and new kinds of fiction---regularly available to each other in an enduringly hierarchized field.

摘要：

尽管体裁小说现在无处不在，而且尽管书籍史和文学研究都对科幻小说和言情小说等个别体裁给予了相当大的关注，但对通俗小说类别体系的历史却鲜有研究。这篇文章追溯了美国杂志和图书出版中类型小说系统的起源，将社会学和图书历史分析应用于 1890 年代到 1950 年代出版、广告、图书馆管理和读者反应中不断变化的分类实践。流派类别在 1910 年代只是断断续续地使用；它们首先在 1920 年代和 30 年代在通俗杂志中被制度化。体裁小说系统只是在所谓的“平装革命”过程中才转移到图书出版业 1940 年代和 50 年代，这为按类别制作小说书提供了空间，同时将其降级为永久的低地位。这种跨出版格式的传输远非故意的；相反，这篇文章认为，体裁小说体系的出现和持续是作为一种稳定的妥协，将不断扩大的小说阅读群体与不断扩大的印刷文化产业联系起来，定期创造新读者和新小说——以及新类型的小说——在一个持久的等级化领域中彼此可用。