Saints of the Middlebrow

Jon Repetti considers Jeremy Rosen’s “Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction.”

By Jon RepettiDecember 9, 2025

• Literary Criticism

IT’S 2025, and the turn to genre is old news. Since at least the 1980s, writers of “literary fiction” have been adopting the forms and techniques of popular “genre fiction”—a huge category that includes detective novels, sci-fi, spy thrillers, fantasy, horror, Westerns, and all varieties of romance. By 2012, China Miéville could tell the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference that it had already become “a cliché to point out that generic tropes are infecting the mainstream.” As ever, it seems that the academics are the last to know. Thirteen years after Miéville’s much-cited remark, Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction can still advertise itself as “the first monograph to address this phenomenon.” (We’ll take the author at his word, while noting that the institutional history of this turn has been told and retold, with the usual variations and hair-splitting, by a number of Rosen’s colleagues: Mark McGurl, Dan Sinykin, and Sarah Brouillette, among others.)

The basic story goes something like this. With the rise of mass culture in the late 19th century, certain prose writers sought to distinguish themselves as makers of “serious art,” cordoning off their work from the crowd of potboilers, bodice rippers, and other products of Grub Street. Building on the example of a few forebears (Gustave Flaubert and Henry James chief among them), the modernists systematized this great divide as a collective project of resistance to market logics in the realm of art. How to produce an artwork irreducible to the commodity form, they asked, especially in a medium as thoroughly bourgeois and commodified as the novel? Over time, this negative self-definition of the art-novel as that-which-is-not-popular-fiction emerged as perhaps the only shared commitment capable of uniting the disparate cadres grouped under the label of “modernism”: the French surrealists, the Italian futurists, the German expressionists, the Russian constructivists, the expat Anglophone circle around Gertrude Stein, and so on. Thus the fetishism of difficulty and personal style, meant to introduce friction into the transparent communication between author-as-proprietor and audience-as-passive-consumer.

As the century progressed, this fantasy of a neat divide between high and low culture, never quite true in practice even at the high-water mark of high modernism, nonetheless continued to maintain a chokehold on writers themselves, though they would constantly transgress its porous borders. This is as true of arch-snobs like Vladimir Nabokov, who experimented with SF in Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) while claiming to “loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories,” as it is of self-professed highbrow lovers of the lowbrow, from James Joyce to William S. Burroughs to Ishmael Reed, whose most demanding works are littered with references and borrowings from the whole spectrum of popular fiction even as they rise to new heights of esoteric experimentalism. And one would be remiss to tell this story without mentioning William Faulkner’s breakthrough foray into the potboiler with Sanctuary (1931)—his first commercial success, which he claimed to have written in three weeks for money—or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s metaphysical noir The Erasers (1953), in which he simultaneously invented the nouveau roman and perfected the roman noir. And what, finally, of Ernest Hemingway himself, whose style (the product of a long apprenticeship with Stein) would be copied with equal admiration by the hacks at Black Mask magazine, the existentialists at Les Deux Magots, and the Ivy League–educated aspirants of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?

So what changed in the 1980s? Rosen basically accepts Sinykin’s account, as told in his 2023 book Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, which has, in any case, long been common sense among authors and publishers. Publishing conglomeration accelerated toward the end of the century, eventually leading to the absorption of every large commercial house besides W. W. Norton & Company into what we now know as the Big Five (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster) and the purchase of those same houses by multinational media conglomerates. (Bertelsmann owns PRH; HarperCollins is a subsidiary of News Corp; and Simon & Schuster had been held by Viacom, CBS, and Paramount before being acquired by a private equity firm in 2023.)

The corporate machinations are complex, but the incentives are simple. Genre fiction sells, literary fiction doesn’t, and therefore publishers want literary fiction that looks more like genre fiction. Around this basic market incentive, the whole literary ecosystem of the Anglophone world (from MFA programs to prize committees to book clubs and beyond) has shifted to elevate the sorts of novels Rosen discusses—works by such latter-day saints of the middlebrow as two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, former PEN America president Jennifer Egan, and Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, all of whom receive extensive attention in Genre Bending. Add to this the central role of Amazon in the book market, accounting for roughly half of all sales, for which “Literary Fiction” is no more than one genre category among hundreds, slotted somewhere between “Legal Thrillers” and “Lumberjack Erotica.”

Surveying Rosen’s examples and close readings, it does seem that something has shifted not only within the publishing economy but also within literary form itself as practiced on the Anglophone scene. Whereas the modernists and postmodernists tended to use low culture as a vast reserve of references, tropes, and stock characters to be deployed as needed within the novel-as-polyvocal-assemblage, integrating genre elements into high-literary forms, our recent crop of “genre-benders” instead work from within the given structures of genre plots, out of which they develop more traditional “literary” elements. Or, as Rosen puts it,

genre-bending writers seek to borrow forms, affordances, and pleasures from popular fiction genres, while at the same time transforming them and marking their deployments as literary. They do so by using techniques that tend to be prioritized in the literary field, like artful prose style, rich depictions of character psychology, and self-reflexivity—as well as underscoring their works’ innovation and differentiating them from a field of popular culture they portray as overly formulaic and commercial.

Strategically, Rosen does not make claims about “the literary” as such but speaks instead of “techniques that tend to be prioritized in the literary field” by publishers, academics, award-giving bodies, and so on. One might read this turn to literary sociology as an admirable bit of academic humility, even a populist gesture. After all, aren’t we all old enough to know by now that “Literature” is and always has been whatever the people in power designate with that name? But one might also say that Rosen is punting on the most vital questions his study raises: not only “What is ‘the literary’ today?” but also “What else could it become?” Indeed, how must we reimagine “the literary” as such if the novel—to say nothing of poetry—is to maintain even a minor place in the cultural field of the 21st century, or retain even a fraction of its powers of critique?

Unsurprisingly, the list of “literary” techniques Rosen comes up with is hopelessly clichéd: “artful prose style,” “rich […] character psychology,” “self-reflexivity”—the kind of phrases you’re likely to hear in a high school AP English class, or read in a New York Times op-ed titled “Why the Humanities Matter Now.” Even worse is when Rosen, alongside his chosen authors and their patrons, begins collapsing these vague qualities under the even vaguer heading of “humanist values.” But are we really content, in 2025, to concede our definition of the literary to the people who hand out the Booker Prize?

As Genre Bending tells it, many of our “major” literary writers today are indeed willing to do just that. Rosen flexes his close-reading muscles to deliver convincing accounts of a contemporary canon-in-formation of genre-benders. He shows how they all come to adopt a definition of the “literary” that is more or less coincident with the above and then oppose those values to those of the genre fictions they adapt and deploy to their own ends. For all the careful distinctions we encounter across the monograph’s six chapters and robust introduction, the overwhelming sense we get of the works under consideration is one of punishing sameness.

Thus we proceed relentlessly across decades of bestsellers. In Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One (2011), we find a central tension between the “mindless repetition” of the zombie-as-consumerist-subject and “the singular stamp of the artist, whose innovation heroically resists the deindividualizing forces of capitalist modernity.” In David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), we encounter a defense of “a varied course of arts and humanities education” insofar as it allows certain characters “to demonstrate their individuality and protest their enslavement.” In Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), we at least see liberal-humanist definitions of the literary placed under greater pressure than elsewhere—“that lovers of Shakespeare were brutal colonizers and the Nazis loved their Goethe and Schiller”—but ultimately Rosen manages a retrenchment within the same old account of “literature’s enduring value.” These summaries, of course, cannot do justice to the author’s intense attention and often ingenious interpretations, yet one can’t help feeling disappointed that his powers have not been put to better use, or let loose upon worthier objects.

I came to Genre Bending depressed at the moribund state of mainstream literary fiction. I came away feeling even worse. I picked it up hoping that a leading scholar might be able to convince me that the dominant strain of literary fiction produced in the United States over the past 30 years might actually have something interesting to say about its own conditions of production. I put it down disabused of that hope.