Right off, I have to make a disclaimer. I don’t actually believe in what the title of this piece suggests–that there is a pecking order separating Literature (capital L) from genre, and that it has something to do with a quantifiable approach to form. If we really wanted to sort out what Henry James and many 20th Century critics mean by Literature from all the rest of the publishing world, we’d be remiss if we didn’t go back to the precursors of contemporary literature and make the same qualifiers apply.
Immediately we have a problem. Where does one put Gulliver’s Travels?…