Minor characters have their day: the politics and popularization of a contemporary genre

"Minor Characters Have Their Day" asks the question: why have so many contemporary writers converted minor characters from canonical literary texts into their protagonists? Why has this previously unnoticed genre proven so appealing to figures as seemingly disparate as John Updike (Gertrude and Claudius) and Margaret Atwood (The Penelopiad), Alice Randall (The Wind Done Gone) and Gregory Maguire ( Wicked)? And what can be learned from reading the transnational history of a genre that a narrower focus on individual, exemplary texts and authors tends to obscure? "Minor Characters Have Their Day" argues that tracing the development of this flourishing genre illuminates the trajectory of left cultural politics of the last forty years---a trajectory in which the literary tradition evolves from an object of insurgent critique, to a microcosm of an inclusive pluralist polity, to a marketing vehicle for a multinational culture industry.;Literary scholars have tended to address intertextual reworkings of the canon primarily in terms of the critiques they level---as instances of "re-vision" or "writing back." While subversive texts, and the hopes scholars have attached to them, are an important part of the story I tell, exclusive attention to texts that express an oppositional politics conveys a mistaken impression about the fortunes of the traditional canon in contemporary culture. When one widens the angle of vision to observe the range of writers---across national boundaries and in both "literary" and popular fiction---that deploy the generic technology I call "minor character elaboration," a very different picture appears. In fact, I argue, the canon returns triumphant, in and through a genre that seemed designed to ensure its obsolescence---and it does so in the prevailing form triumph takes in contemporary life: triumph in the marketplace. This dissertation argues for revising critical orthodoxies about contemporary reworkings of the canon, and, perhaps as importantly, rehabilitates genre analysis as a critical tool by combining formalist inquiry and narrative theory with cultural and material histories.