A generic proposal.

Michael, Rose

A playful attempt to formulate a theory regarding how the use, misuse and abuse of aspects of genre fiction may found a proper understanding of and response to the current (arguably dire) state of literary publishing in Australia. Innovatively re-reinterpreting established ideas about genre to suggest that literary fiction, in practice (how it's manufactured and marketed by publishers; how it's displayed and categorised in bookstores), might be a 'kind' of novel and that this realisation may be of practical benefit if we are to effectively address what has been identified by Mark Davis as 'the decline of the literary paradigm'.

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To start where I did: I became interested in the borders of literary fiction--and those who patrol them, in the books that cross and perhaps challenge the popular/literary boundary and those that straddle and might unravel the high/low art divide, when I saw a phrase repeated in two rejection letters from different publishers for my first novel, The Asking Game. The difficulty, they said, would be in 'how to position and market it'; this was, they explained, because it was both 'literary' and 'speculative': belonging to the 'high' art field but exhibiting 'generic' aspects. Funnily enough, I'd never thought of that before. (2) The thing is, as soon as I read these comments I thought 'Yes!': yes, that's what it is; that's what I want to write, what I want to read. And what I want to understand: how do some books cross fields and why would writers mix genres? When might that pose a problem, and could it ever be a solution?

IMAGINING LITERARY FICTION AS A GENRE

To reach any such understanding we first need to agree on basic terms--not because I'm interested in a classificatory exercise, far from it: I want to identify overlaps and gaps only in order to recognise opportunities. The literary is generally accepted to be a field, as is popular fiction (presumably a force field, rather than a farm field; one that is potentially flexible or even movable). The speculative, on the other hand, is recognised as a genre or, more precisely, a sub-genre of fiction. So the relationship between lit and sci-fi can be conceived of, at the same time, as that between 'high' and 'low' alternatives--the literary versus the (possibly speculative) popular, and as that of a subset to a greater whole--a style of genre within the broader category of (potentially literary) fiction. (3)

Literary fiction may be like the novel, then, which Mikhail Bakhtin claimed was too inclusive of other modes and meanings, too dependent on other genres to be one in its own right, (4) but in the 'real world' of publishing such subtleties--of field versus genre--are lost as books are sold and shelved according to simple, clearly signed categories. In bookstores literary-fiction and science-fiction are equivalent but visually distinct and (geographically) differentiated options. Publishers may be becoming more interested in books that work across fields--be they literary/popular or fiction/non-fiction--for a range of commercial and socio-cultural reasons, but they remain sceptical of those that truly mix and muddy conventions of 'kinds'. (5) They want generic clarity, knowing it's easier to market, and believing it's easier to make.

I'm wondering if this practical equivalence might be pragmatically useful in helping us understand how books can belong to, or travel between, the literary and the speculative: I'm thinking of those hybrid examples that are not easily agreed to be either high or low, exploiting elements of each but belonging finally to neither; and the unique cases that don't obviously fit a particular, popular type, exploring only some aspects of one. What happens, then, to the boundaries that are crossed in such cases: do they bend? Do types blend?

The way contemporary theorists such as John Frow convincingly argue it, genres aren't established according to some set of stable rules; 'they have no essence' in and of themselves; (6) rather they are performed (and can be transformed) in the act of reading (which inevitably situates them in relation to a contemporary 'hierarchy of value'.) (7) Genre, then, is a question of identification according to current context. (8) (A matter of reader recognition somewhat similar to what I experienced when I encountered that professional summation of my own 'mixed-up' writing.) Which seems not that dissimilar to how we decide, how we know, what is and isn't 'literary' ... (9)

Although Frow isn't directly concerned with the 'formulaic' and 'conventional' (10) sub-genres of the novel that interest me personally, his understanding of genre as a dynamic process, with 'new genres ... constantly emerging and old ones changing their function' (11) applies perfectly. If, for the moment, we suspend our critical disbelief and entertain the idea of literary fiction as a genre, then I too am primarily interested in 'an investigation of the relations between genres'; (12) border crossings, that is, and boundary books.

To continue the parallel: according to Frow, genres 'classify objects in ways that are sometimes precise, sometimes fuzzy, but always sharper at the core than at the edges; and they belong to a system of kinds, and are meaningful only in terms of the shifting differences between them.' (13) Genre, then, is not a stable taxonomy--although at any given moment it's '"stabilised enough" or "stabilised-for-now"' (14)--even if it's enacted as such 'in publishers' catalogues and booksellers' classification ... in the guidelines and deliberations of arts organisations, and in the discourses of marketing and publicity'. (15) Even if it's also constructed as such, as stable, via these same practices.

It's hardly novel to suggest that the process of commercial categorisation is delimiting reading practices and limiting writers. But I'd like to propose, to hope, that it could have the opposite effect: that the more producers--be they authors or the publishing/marketing machine--define a given genre (even, maybe especially, what is 'literary' and what is not), the easier and more alluring it might be for writers and readers to challenge those confines. The firmer the edges are drawn, the sharper the 'generic' core is made; the clearer the limits become: which means more obvious opportunities for trans-genre forays.

But how do books cross generic categories? One easy-to-see way is via those aspects of the text that Gerard Genette terms 'paratext'; from the 'publisher's peritext' of format and font, to the title and even the name of the author, through to the 'public epitext' of interviews and auto-reviews--in short, everything that 'enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public.' (16) A close consideration of the more obvious of these illustrates how publishing practices clearly participate in what Frow calls the 'doing' of genre. (17) Consider the way covers and author promotions position books (and reading communities). While the agent's (or possibly the author's) pitch, and the book's blurb, may emphasise its ability to appeal to more than one type of reader--'It's Lord of the Rings meets Lord of the Flies'; 'The Island of Doctor Moreau meets The Island of the Day Before'--the 'publisher's peritext' locates it firmly within the chosen section ... whatever that is (even if it's some kind of new, sub--or cross-genre). (18) Which, in turn, reinforces the albeit-false stability of that type.

Even when genres are crossed, as they so frequently, and I would argue inevitably, are (for artistic or political as well as commercial reasons), books are forced to fit a particular category at the moment they are ordered, stocked and shelved. And sold, let's not forget that: BookScan, which tracks the sales data gathered from participating retailers, doesn't even recognise 'literary-fiction' as a category, just 'fiction' (seeming to suggest that, for the trade, the former is indeed a subset of the latter). This has recently resulted in some interesting discussions, as publishing statisticians grapple with arguably academic distinctions. (19)

But I'll return to BookScan later. First I'd like to consider a recent example that seems to slip betwixt speculative and literary fiction, suggesting that those categories are indeed two 'kinds' that a text can cross between. I'm going to call such books 'genre-crossing' since that seems to capture not only the transition, but also the ongoing transaction between types; as well as suggesting the possibility of some sort of transvestism.

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AN IMAGINATIVE EXAMPLE OF GENRE-CROSSING

Take The Time Traveler's Wife; (20) an elegy on love and loss that just happens to be about a guy who travels in time. (21) Look at the cover: a tinted, slightly blurred photograph of the kind strongly associated with literary books, in line with the poetic prose inside (Figure 1). Compare it with James Tiptree Jr's Ten Thousand Light Years from Home (22) (Figure 2), which contains the short story 'Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket' that concerns similar themes of time travel, love and loss, and also culminates in a wife being left alone to wait a lifetime for a brief, longed-for reunion with her lover--although it evokes these in quite a different register. Not only does the cover ensure the earlier collection is shelved as science-fiction, but even the author Alice Sheldon's name is a (para)textual element manipulated in line with generic conventions.

Could one of the reasons why the latter is 'literary' be simply a matter of time? In the same decade that Tiptree's collection appeared, another science-fiction writer, Joanna Russ, published an article on 'The wearing out of genre materials', in which she proposes that scenes, or plots, pass through three distinct stages as they're used, reused and maybe abused: innocence, plausibility and decadence. (23) To summarise: first there's the simple and naive stage of novelty, of the introduction of a marvel; then the situation makes concessions to logic and the emphasis is on explanation; finally the 'genre construct', 'the motif or scene or thrilling action for whose sake whole stories were once written', becomes either a) a collection of rituals, b) part of the stylised convention, or c) 'a metaphorical element in something else'. (24) Which exactly describes what's happened to this conceit of lovers who time-travel within their own lives: the more recent book has reworked the '70s story--worked it in, or into, a new mode. (25) The central sci-fi paradox has become a metaphorical device in a work of literary fiction. (26)

But it isn't only the publisher's peritext that makes The Time Traveler's Wife genre-crossing or field-distorting (after all, the paratextual packaging doesn't usually--or not intentionally--miss-pitch books, just emphasises some of their attributes at the expense of others). We also recognise its content as 'literary', albeit tied to the requirement of science-fiction. (Some, such as Roberts, may disagree--genre is, after all, dependent on the reading, and academics are particularly active and contrary readers--but reviews and accolades and even Roberts' own summary suggest that most consumers concur.)

To try to identify The Time Traveler's Wife's literary aspects, though--be they language and tone, 'novel' mode, interest in character and poetic as well as philosophical truths, or even linguistic and thematic use of metaphor--is a fraught exercise. An example of the very classification that, I'm arguing, only helps books slip through the cracks; just as the attempt to pin genres down simply succeeds in identifying precise points of perversion ... or areas ripe for pervasion. So perhaps we should resist assigning The Time Traveler's Wife to the literary genre, with a decadent or exhausted science-fiction idea as its dominant metaphor, and instead consider it as an example of another, hybrid form. Could the literary/speculative border be the birthplace of a new genus?

This is definitely one of the ways that new genres are created, as the offspring of established lineages: such as the border of literature and life-stories seeding 'fake' autobiographies, and the boundary between literature and young-adult writing spawning the 'crossover' category. Consider, specifically, the now comparatively well-established category of 'science-fiction' itself; (27) there's a strong historical precedent for works emerging at or out of the fertile intersection of the literary and its bookstore neighbour--although this may have been truer in the distant past of H G Wells, when literature was less focused on first-person, present-tense, semi-autobiographical narratives of self, or in the recent past of J G Ballard when 'new wave' SF was more likely to jettison generic narrative forms and plots.

But the point I'd like to repeat is that just as classification is not necessarily productive, neither is re- or new classifications. Whether undertaken by readers, consciously or not; reading communities and academics; or publishers, who need DNA in order to clone success, it simply reinforces borders, redefines boundaries. (Which may yet set new challenges, identify new opportunities for transgressions etc.) To return to Frow, I concur that 'the point, in any case, is not to assign [the example] to one or more genres, but rather to notice its provocation of the question about what kind of thing it is, a provocation which, however forcefully it unsettles generic norms, never takes us to some point beyond that question.' (28)

Which is equally, even especially, pertinent when tempted to name, or assign a text to a new kind. If genres only have meaning in terms of the shifting differences between them, as Frow argues, then understanding demands that limit; recognition needs that intersection; reading (a) genre relies on knowing (other) genres. Instead of following the 'hybrid' path, then, I'd like to use Jacques Derrida's 'Law of genre' (29) to propose that texts such as The Time Traveler's Wife, which unsettle generic norms, are 'impurely' literary--and that might make them, controversially, the purest 'generic' literature of all. (30)

Literature, obviously, has always simulated and assimilated other ideas, other themes, other forms. What we understand it to be--and what literary fiction is--is always evolving, always becoming. The emergence and convergence of 'generic' aspects is an established part of that process. (Indeed, elsewhere Genette argues that literature is, by definition, 'intentionally aesthetic' texts; (31) it's recognised, then, as a kind of 'best of all breeds': the key attribute its constituents have in common is quality.) But what is the effect of such acts of incorporation? Is the literary category--the (force) field--defused? Disempowered? Is that what's happening, or what we might want to happen, now, when literary fiction seems all but exhausted?

Russ admits with refreshing honesty (32) that 'artists usually pay a great deal of attention to "low" culture, and when they find low culture that interests them they pay it the supreme compliment of stealing it.' (33) According to her model, it's popular genre writers who introduce new marvels, and explore their plausibility, before they're assimilated, adopted or 'stolen' by the dominant mode. Frow too sees genre as 'the driving force of change in the literary field', (34) arguing that genres test the limits--of shared values and who we are, as well as of writing and reading practices. But if we continue to imagine 'the literary' as also a genre--just a genre, another genre--then it must share the generic aspects we've been charting here: a fundamental instability (stabilised-enough always meaning considerably unstable); the ability to be crossed; and, I'm coming to this, an essential impurity. It's Derrida himself, of course, who points out that the law inevitably contains its opposite, unavoidably calls up the counter-law--albeit as a way of introducing the principle of impurity. But it works both ways: literary fiction is the driving force of change, then, as well as the changed; it's the stolen as well as the stealer.

A GENERIC SOLUTION

'As soon as the word "genre" is sounded,' writes Derrida, 'as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn.' (35) This concept is useful--and, it seems to me, true--for all sub-genres of the novel, from the literary to the less so: with that limit being at once a disabler and an enabler, a fence and a new frontier. The edges of genres are like the 'undefined zone' of the paratext: 'more than a boundary or a sealed border, [it] is, rather, a threshold ... ' (36) A door to be stepped through, a line to cross.

According to Derrida, the law of genre is ultimately 'a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy' (37)--which sure sounds like literature to me--and any intermixing 'by accident or through transgression, by mistake or through a lapse ... should confirm, since, after all, we are speaking of "mixing", the essential purity of their identity.' (38) This suggests that the literary border is never bent by 'impure' books like The Time Traveler's Wife, but nor do they bend around it--they are, after all, simply adhering to generic law. Rather, books like these show there never were any boundaries: the literary genre has no limits other than those we bring to the text (as directed by context and paratext). But boy, do we bring them ...

Because, back in the bookstore, we know this is simply not the case--or, rather, not simply the case. Perhaps we need to push the point further, take it to Russ's 'decadent' extreme. Could it be, on the contrary, that the literary genre is concerned only with limits? That any 'exceptions' are actually the rule against which other more literal-minded, mainstream literature might be measured: that in the impurity, the inclusiveness of the 'contaminated' text, lies the very essence of literariness? If the most mixed is the most pure, if works that work borders occupy the Frowian 'core', then 'the literary' might be made up of or manifest best in precisely such genre-crossing texts as The Time Traveler's Wife--which participate without finally belonging, take part in while not fully being part of. (39)

I wonder: might this be the Derridean scenario where 'the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole'? (40) Couldn't the speculative be the field that 'gathers together and keeps from closing'; (41) which contains the literary as but one subset? Hasn't literary-fiction fulfilled all the generic requirements, and doesn't science-fiction have a long, clandestine tradition of subterfuge and sabotage? Perhaps. Doris Lessing has suggested that 'the current mode of "realistic" fiction of the last 200 years is the aberration and that fantastic literature is the mainstream which has never run dry and still f lows freely.' (42) A view expressed by John W Campbell, editor of science-fiction magazine Astounding, as early as 1948, who pondered whether:

 That group of writings which is usually referred to as 'mainstream
 literature' is actually a special subgroup of the field of science
 fiction--for science fiction deals with all placed in the Universe,
 and all times in Eternity, so the literature of the here-and-now
 is, truly, a subset of science fiction. (43)

It may not be a new idea, or even a particularly realistic one, but it seems to me that the time is ripe for such a playful proposition. While we're unlikely ever to accept literature as subset of sci-fi, it might help us recognise the ways in which it really does work very much like a sub-genre of fiction.

A PRAGMATIC CONCLUSION

Why should that matter, now? Because I agree with Mark Davis that the paradigm is in decline and we are witnessing a literary crisis of sorts. (44) Popular fiction tops sales and publishing lists to the detriment of local, more 'mixed' and less-mainstream authors. Publishers may think they're interested in books that work across categories, but their focus on generic 'purity' and cloning 'core' texts has narrowed the field to many writers' and readers' frustrations. (And doesn't the decline of the paradigm itself signal that literary fiction is but a genre, and an old one on the way out at that?) This has led to an ever-widening rift between literary fiction and its sister sets, which, in turn, has resulted in more people having to choose between radically different kinds of novels. And, disappointingly for literature-lovers, less genre-bending books seems to result in more people choosing poor-quality pulp ... let's call it pap.

Of course, publishing itself, and genre publishing in particular, is by its very nature responsible for exactly that 'repetition' which has resulted in the Derridaean state where we cannot distinguish with rigour between the original 'nova' and its copy, between the innocent motif and its decadent metaphor. Between fictional fields and literary genres. (Although, more hopefully, repetition is also how disruptive anomalies are engendered: those ghosts in the machine.)

I believe general fiction readers are curious and inclusive, even if catalogues and commissioning editors are not. Indeed, the overseas success of books like The Time Traveler's Wife surely proves my point. But what works overseas doesn't necessarily get the same chance here. The Australian book industry is commercially a very small and highly competitive market, dominated by a handful of multinational companies which import their parent company's titles and rely on BookScan to make local publishing decisions. Not only does the sales tracking system fail to categorise books as 'literary'; it doesn't garner much data from independent booksellers--the main outlet for such fiction. Which is why it has been identified as in some way responsible for the declining sales--and resultant drop-off in production--of literary fiction. (45)

And, of course, the difficulties that face 'conventional' literature, which fulfils the current expectations of the genre, only increase when it comes to publishing books that aren't so easily categorised. But these works could well be the saving grace of the category--the driving force of transformation. Fantastic-, speculative--or science-fiction, in particular, are not only imaginative, but often intelligently so, offering readers and writers the opportunity to conceive of possible futures, explore alternate realities and different existences, debate technical developments and consider the possible consequences of current debates ... as well as be educated, enlightened and entertained. Like literature. 'Science fiction [too] is less a genre ... than an ongoing discussion.' (46) But that's just my personal bias. I'd argue that any books which straddle the spaces between the literary section of the bookstore and other shelves have more to offer us than the sum of their generic parts or the whole of their hybrid natures.

Therefore my generic proposal is that using (misusing, abusing etc) genre is a practical solution to the current state of literary exhaustion, an injection of new life from the margins, and that genre is also a theoretical approach to understanding the relationships between literary and not-so-literary types of texts--as well as to investigating its relationships with reading communities and publishing practices. Which I'll get to ...

Rose Michael

Creative Arts (1)

ENDNOTES

(1) Rose Michael is now completing her PhD at the University of Western Australia.

(2) I'm happy to say it's now been published by a predominantly non-fiction, travel publisher--Transit Lounge--which won't be described as such for much longer.

(3) Although this summary seems to me convincing, it doesn't allow for the many critical contradictions, manifest nicely in Science Fiction (2nd edition), Routledge, New York and Oxford, 2006, which refers to the SF category as a 'field' on the back of the book and as 'a genre or division of literature' on page one. It also does away with the debated differences between SF and speculative fiction.

(4) Interestingly, while Bakhtin's study of the novel is generally understood as a conceptualisation of what is referred to commercially, and here, as literary fiction (as opposed to other literary genres such as the epic etc), he seems to speak for the broader category of novels in general when he argues that it's 'the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted.' He goes on to describe, albeit as a reservation of a characteristic, the way novels 'are mass-produced as pure and frivolous entertainment like no other genre'. M M Bakhtin, 'Epic and novel: Toward a methodology for the study of the novel', in David Duff (ed.), Modern Genre Theory, Pearson, UK, 2000, 69, 74.

(5) 'Kind' was the older, Anglo-Saxon word for a literary category that was replaced by the 'irremediably French' word 'genre' around the beginning of this century--'at precisely the point at which that concept was being seen throughout Europe as increasingly problematic'--according to Duff in his introduction to Modern Genre Theory (6) with reference to the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition).

(6) John Frow, Genre, Routledge, New York and Oxford, 2005, 134.

(7) Frow, 130.

(8) (My emphasis.) Indeed, this 'generic' process seems particularly in evidence when it comes to literature: many books, such as those by Kurt Vonnegut and J G Ballard, are belatedly claimed as 'literary' after initially being published (according to the understanding that follows), and received, as popular fiction.

(9) As Roberts writes, in regard to science-fiction's similar resistance to easy definition: 'This is a strange thing, because most people have a sense of what science fiction is' (1).

(10) Frow, 1.

(11) Frow, 10.

(12) (My emphasis.) Frow, 3.

(13) Frow, 128.

(14) Frow, 28.

(15) Frow, 13.

(16) Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Jane E Lewin (trans.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, 1.

(17) Frow, 144.

(18) This is not to take up the 'sort of circular reasoning ... [that, according to Roberts, suggests] the whole business of definition is nothing more than a cynical marketing exercise' (Roberts, 2), but rather to adopt Genette's structuralist approach in order to explore how contemporary publishing practices, such as marketing, define the SF category.

(19) It's hardly surprising that the key to such categorisation seems likely to reside in format: trade paperback (the new hardback) denotes contemporary literary fiction while, at the other end of the scale, A-format designates a popular 'blockbuster'. 'B's are generally literary, but what about small, cheap, re-released classics? It might be simpler if publishers entered the requested data themselves, but would it be correct? Perhaps the distribution channel should also be factored into the equation, as well as the price-point and units sold ... Now that would be a circular argument: mass-market fiction is that which acts like mass-market fiction.

(20) Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife, MacAdam/Cage Publishing, San Francisco, 2003.

(21) Described, disappointingly, by Roberts as 'a conventional contemporary-set love story that uses its SF novum as garnish to an otherwise rather ordinary tale of the tribulations of courtship' (22) in a similar discussion of stories that share the same 'novum' or 'new idea'--which Roberts describes very broadly as that of 'a character who comes loose in time'.

(22) James Tiptree Jr, Ten Thousand Light Years from Home, Ace Books, New York, 1973.

(23) Joanna Russ, 'The wearing out of genre materials', College English, vol.33, no.1, October 1971, 48.

(24) Russ, 50. This fits, somewhat, with SF author and critic Damien Broderick's definition that science-fiction de-emphasises fine-writing and characterisation and is marked by 'certain priorities [such as a focus on object over subject, and plausible explanations] more often found in scientific and postmodern texts than in literary models' (my emphasis). Damien Broderick, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction, Routledge, London and New York, 1995, 155; quoted in Roberts, 11.

(25) Not necessarily consciously, of course. Roberts isn't the only one to point out that there appears to be a discrete number of subjects for science-fiction, which he goes on to list. Roberts, 12.

(26) Interestingly, a US publisher once told me at an Adelaide Writers' Festival that his strategy was to take other countries' genre fiction and repackage it as lit. Which works ... in America, anyway.

(27) In Russ's '70s essay, the term wasn't consistently hyphenated--suggesting either poor editing, or that it was in a state of adjectival flux on its way to acquiring what Frow sees as 'the status' of a noun (138). Many current critics choose not to compound the words, instead preferring the SF designation, which I find revealing ... likewise the lack of discussion around this 'epitextual' (auto-critical) aspect of the genre itself.

(28) Frow, 111.

(29) Jacques Derrida, 'The law of genre', Avital Ronell (trans.), Critical Inquiry, vol.7, no.1, 1980.

(30) I feel I should clarify my scope here by specifying some literary exceptions: I'm not referring to authors such as Haruki Marakami and Salman Rushdie whose books are full of imaginary and impossible scenarios. While they might fit Russ's view that 'the only thing that makes many stories science fiction is that they are not about things as they are' (Russ, 54), they're not produced, shelved, bought or read as genre fiction, which are my chosen parameters. They're also not dominated by the implications of Darko Suvin's 'novum'; they don't satisfy Robert Scholes' 'structural' point; or Broderick's demand for 'popular' features (definitions cited in Roberts, 9-10). What I'm looking at--and for, always for--are those writers working closer to the literary margins; those who have, at various times, been understood to belong to another camp: such as William Gibson. (In accordance with my approach, you only need to review the diverse formats of Gibson's books to see how much of a boundary writer he is and always has been.)

(31) Gerard Genette. Fiction and Diction, Catherine Porter (trans), Cornell University Press, New York, 1994.

(32) Well, depending on whom she's identifying with ... probably both parties, as a 'genre-crossing' writer. (I wonder if it might also be relevant that so many SF writers work in both fiction and criticism?)

(33) Russ, 53.

(34) Frow, 68.

(35) Derrida, 56.

(36) Genette, Paratexts, 1.

(37) Derrida, 59.

(38) Derrida, 57.

(39) Derrida, 59.

(40) Derrida, 59.

(41) Derrida, 65.

(42) Quoted in Anthony Wolk, 'Challenge the boundaries: An overview of science fiction and fantasy', The English Journal, vol.79, no.3, 1990, 26-31.

(43) Campbell, quoted in Roberts, 56.

(44) Mark Davis, 'The decline of the literary paradigm in Australian publishing', Heat, no. 12, 2006.

(45) Malcolm Knox, 'The ex factor', The Monthly, no. 1, 2005.

(46) Farah Mendlesohn, quoted in Roberts, 24.