Literature Atlas

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Popular and Genre Novel Forms

Novel forms defined primarily by their commercial market category, readership or subject matter rather than a formal literary technique or critical movement. Includes the romance novel and its market subgenres such as historical, Regency, contemporary, erotic, Ruritanian and Western romance, mass-market and pulp terms such as the chapbook, potboiler, bonkbuster, yellow-back and formula fiction, identity- and readership-defined categories such as chick lit, lad lit, lab lit and LGBTQ literature, religious market fiction such as the Christian novel, Bible fiction, urban Christian fiction and Fifth Gospel, and subject-defined micro-genres named for their own setting or topic, such as the war, sports, medical, nautical, musical, mathematical and tourism novel, theatre-fiction, petrofiction, the graphic novel, and the cowboy-frontier Western Fiction genre itself. Excludes youth-specific and school-specific fiction, grouped instead under Youth and School Fiction, and forms defined by a formal literary movement, grouped under Western Literary Novel Forms.

Facts
Comparison
Era of Emergence
1800 1
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Sources
1. Genre Fiction (Wikipedia)
WikipediaGenre fiction, lead section
Quote, Genre fiction, lead section
Genre fiction developed from various subgenres of the novel (and its romance version) during the nineteenth century, along with the growth of the mass-marketing of fiction in the twentieth century
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