“I adore stories that push on inexorably, frightening stories,” Flaubert's Emma Bovary explains: “I detest common heroes and temperate feelings, the way they are in life.” In view of the incongruity of Emma's sensationalist reading matter with her unromantic provincial scene, she seems to have found herself in the wrong kind of novel, in one of those realistically muted novels she deplores (“common heroes and temperate feelings”), rather than in the formula fictions she likes to read, with their “frightening stories,” their “stories that push on inexorably.” I mentioned earlier that Emma's own story picks up the qualities of the books she reads as it rushes “inexorably” to abandonment and ruin, madness and suicide, rejected conventions of an older escapism sneaking into Flaubert's ultra-modern realism. As Flaubert implies, and for reasons I hope to outline in this chapter, the barrier dividing “genre fiction” from “literary fiction” is never really as stable as it appears.

Genre fiction/literary fiction

The difference is clearly considered great enough to warrant literary and genre fiction occupying distinct sections of bookstore and library shelves. Genres are separated from one another in categories titled “mystery,” “romance,” “fantasy,” and the like, and all separated from the miscellaneous titles classified as “literature” or “literary fiction” or just “fiction.”