Given we spoke about this recently *g*, I figured I'd pull my brain away from study long enough to formulate a comment on this subject.

I've long been of the view that there are a number of types of genre. There are three I tend to pay most attention to, which I've given the following labels: thematic, environmental, and social/cultural.

The idea of thematic genre is illustrated by genres such as romance and crime. Books and stories within these genres use a particular theme (love and crime respectively) as their major basis. For the most part, books and stories within these genres are based in some form of reality, whether it be historical or current; factual or replicated.

Genres such as science fiction and fantasy are an excellent illustration of what I like to call environmental genre, where the major thematic basis is not necessrily consistent for all books and stories within the genre, and writers often concentrate on exploring real themes within imagined and speculative realities and environments.

The last type of genre is social/cultural, wherein lie genres such as literature and mainstream. These genres are higly reliant upon the social/cultural climate (though literature only insofar that it normally takes change in cultural/social climate for newer books to be categorised as literature) in their definition.

Particularly when considering these three major types of genre, it begs the obvious question as to what happens to books that span two, or even several genres?

We like to label things. Just as we stereotype people, we stereotype ideas. We discriminate along the axes we have for our ideas, because that's convenient for us. I don't know if we can pull it all the way down to a subconsious hunter/gatherer level or something along the lines "eat/not eat", but there must be something fundamentally "wrong" in our brains when it comes to modern day values.

Our brains can't accept that the world is often gray, it want's easy black and white, us and them. Even the most PC of us will reveal our discriminating ideas in small ways; as all of those who claim to have a non-white friend, when it is mostly an acquaintance, and probably not even that.

That's where literary genres stem from, it is easier to put things down on one axis instead of describing three or four, which would be way better, as pr. Ariella's comment.

In conclusion? No conclusion. Well, there is one, I like those who say that I don't care if I have a black friend or not, I care that I have good friends. So, translated to this, I don't care which genre a book is, as long as it is a good book!
--
When in doubt,
turn around,
cry and shout

spdyvkng - my homepage

I firmly believe, after many bookstore visits and video store visits, people are just completely apathetic towards any genre they don't have a personal interest for. Much like critics. It is rare that the management in either business will actually inspect where movies or books are located. There may be exceptions, but I've yet to see any.

A prime example is a consignment bookstore I used to visit. They had a vast collection of old and out-of-print books. The people working in the store were avid (frenzied) romance fans. They had posters up everywhere, even romance books separated by theme. Even erotica had a special place. Westerns and children's books were tolerable and adequately classified.

Thriller, horror, contemporary mystery, etc. were all lumped together in a section merely labeled "weird."

I, too, have seen rampant mistakes when shelving books or movies where they belong. I don't believe it's from customer opinion or designation at all. I honestly don't think there's any "professional" genre standard right now.

You would think businesses would want more clarity and classification, but that doesn't seem to be valued any more than free items for the customer. As long as they profit from it, they don't seem to care.

Just my thoughts.