In the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman talks about Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and how genre can be a useful tool in examining fiction:
Frye’s way of thinking is especially valuable today because it recognizes that the clash of genre values is fundamental to the novelistic experience. That’s how we ought to be thinking about our books. Instead of asking whether a comic book could be “as valuable” as “King Lear,” we ought to ask how the values of tragedy and romance might collide. Instead of lamenting the decline of “literary fiction,” we ought to ask why the novel, with its interest in society and rules, is ceding ground to the romance.
