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Jeremy Rosen traces the recent surge books that transform minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new work. A genre that sought to recover the voices of marginalized individuals and groups has begun to embody the neoliberal commitments of subjective experience, individual expression, and agency.
Reader #2 -- Jeremy Rosen is assistant professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace (Columbia University Press, 2016). I selected him for his work on contemporary fiction.Jeremy Rosen is an assistant professor of English at the University of Utah. His work has been published in New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, and Post45.
Mark McGurl, Stanford University:To have discovered a fictional genre thriving unnoticed in the postwar literary field would have been impressive enough. Minor Characters Have Their Day does much more than this, contributing brilliantly to the study of genre as such. Lively, lucid, and persuasive, its reach will be very wide.
Deborah L. Nelson, author of Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America:An homage, critique, and exploitation of the literary tradition, the genre of minor-character elaboration has hid in plain sight since Jean Rhys inaugurated it in 1966 and the publishing industry capitalized on its appeal shortly thereafter. Rosen takes this strange mix of the oppositional and conventional to reexamine genre theory and the history of the novel. An important book for anyone interested in genre or the post-'45 moment.
Andrew Hoberek, author of The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post–World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work:Minor Characters Have Their Day is a superb book that focuses on a seemingly minor contemporary literary genre—what Rosen calls 'minor-character elaboration'—to make larger claims about contemporary fiction more generally, about genre and its relationship to the consolidation of the publishing industry over the last several decades, and about the nature of literary character.
James English, author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value:Jeremy Rosen's book sheds light on two complex and entwined features of the contemporary literary system: the growing commercial and symbolic importance of genre fiction and the proliferation of novels whose heroes are retooled versions of other novels' minor characters. Moving deftly between readings of individual works and arguments in sociological theory, Rosen succeeds in leveraging the genre of minor-character elaboration as an illuminating case study in the social and institutional dimensions of the contemporary book world.
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