AustLit

'Browsing the shelves of fiction at the renovated Marrickville library, a reader’s attention is drawn to the icon taped onto the spine. A heart for romance, a dragon for fantasy, a ringed planet for science fiction, a detective for noir, a kangaroo for Australian fiction, an Aboriginal flag for Indigenous fiction, and on, and on. It is necessarily reductive; how can you distil a whole field to a single symbol? Classification systems like these cannot account for boundary-crossing fiction, nor for subgenre, nor for texts that subvert genre expectations. And if a novel is both Australian and science fiction, which category is considered the most appropriate, the more important, to be put on the spine, and who is it that makes these decisions? What does it mean for a novel to be marked and marketed in this way, and how is it effected in so-called Australia? And when a novel is designated a genre, how does this affect a reader’s encounter with it?'  (Publication summary)