Writing : Gothic v Southern Gothic?

Well, we're all writers, and I think most of us like to be (or would like to be) published. So when you go to Duotrope and run a search, the first thing they ask for is "Genre" then they ask for "Subgenre". It's relatively important to know where you lean as an author if you want to make sure you're submitting to the right publications and agents. It may not matter to YOU, and it may not even matter to the reader, but if you want to get anywhere you have to have some understanding of where you fall.

I thought it was obvious that I meant in getting published, as I opened with that. And really, you could just "hope for the best", but I'd rather understand my craft AND the business side so that I can stop "hoping" and start working toward something.

And I think I write all over the place, too, but if you can pinpoint the genre or genres a story falls into, you can pinpoint the places most likely to care about it, and instead of wasting time with people who don't give a rat's ass about your writing, you can put it to publications and/or agents that will be excited about it. Because submitting DOES take time--time I'd rather spend writing. 

^I agree with that, I was just addressing the "why" behind this discussion.

"Genre" isn't simply a marketing term. Distinctions between thematic/aesthetic features of long works of fiction have been made for a while, before "marketing" was even a word, let alone the ugly necessity it is now.

In poetry, a ballad and a lyric are different things, even though you could set both to music. The distinction isn't made based on marketing terms. The world and its literature have existed a little longer than that.

Genre is an academic thing, too, a pretty important one. The distinctions we make between genres are what allows us to think in terms of "movements" and "periods" and "highbrow/lowbrow" and "contemporary concerns" and "aesthetic developments" and many other unfashionable navel-gazing things.

I must really like Southern gothic!

Come on people, we don't have enough females to be running them off. 

i thought YOU did, sparrow :(

i just try to be careful to not bring negativity into a thread :)

Serpent Box was beautiful, i loved it, too. i also love Vincent.

and that's a confusing classification, because there's also now the term Appalachian Gothic, and the story takes place in Appalachia, so does it fall there instead? this is why i'm so confused. it all goes back to trying to classify Vonnegut and all the dissent and confusion there... sci-fi? slipstream? political satire? i think he's been tossed into all those.

this has already been posted, but : Gothic: of or relating to a style of fiction characterized by the use of desolate or remote settings and macabre, mysterious, or violent incidents

so, to go by that alone (not questioning the term Gothic itself but just differences in types of Gothic) wouldn't the classifications be based on location alone?  

"Genre" isn't simply a marketing term. Distinctions between thematic/aesthetic features of long works of fiction have been made for a while, before "marketing" was even a word, let alone the ugly necessity it is now.

    In poetry, a ballad and a lyric are different things, even though you could set both to music. The distinction isn't made based on marketing terms. The world and its literature have existed a little longer than that.
    Genre is an academic thing, too, a pretty important one. The distinctions we make between genres are what allows us to think in terms of "movements" and "periods" and "highbrow/lowbrow" and "contemporary concerns" and "aesthetic developments" and many other unfashionable navel-gazing things.

I don't know about this, it feels like trying to retroactively give 'genre' the same distinctions we give to academic line-drawing. I will grant that both on the academic side of grouping works on aesthetic developments (though if you look at most 'artistic movements' or periods you'll notice that they are mostly just grouped by sell-by dates (and this is why both Chopin and Liszt are rolling in their graves at being grouped together)) and the marketing side of putting genre labels around groups of works that share similar traits (but more importantly for genre, similar audiences) they are both just line drawing exercises. Putting a group of works together and calling it 'horror' is pretty much the same as putting a group of poets together and calling them 'late-romantics'. And also, many of the criteria we use to make each of those distinctions are present in both camps, we are using many of the same tools to draw those lines as we've used in the past to draw other lines.

So yes, in this broad sense of what a genre is, there is more than just marketing considerations in place. And I will also grant that the entire idea of creating 'genre' striations around individual works is a very old idea that has been with us since the beginnings of literature.

But, I think that in trying to say that what we call a 'genre' today has the same purpose and criteria as what was called a 'genre' 200 years ago (or even 70 years ago), is a little far-reaching. You really only have to look at the classical genres to see that we are talking about two different... lets call it intentions. And these are genres that some academics still look at when drawing their lines: like the epic, and the lyric, and the dramatic, or romantic, or tragic, or comic, or tragicomic... there's a few more. Clearly the 'rules' used to divide these works into these classifications are different than the rules used to divide modern works (or even to retro fit older works) into the genres of 'southern gothic' and 'alternate history'.

And the change of rules over time is inevitable; I'm not trying to say that for genre distinctions to be more than just marketing decisions it has to follow some sort of hallowed course set by the greeks, or consented upon by the academics. What I'm saying is that the very idea of putting your work into a group of other similar works is a marketing consideration. We don't put our works into genres because they share aesthetic similarities with other work in that genre. We put the genre label onto our work that it shares the most aesthetic similarities to, in order to appeal to that genre's market... or, if you find that particular phrasing too distasteful: using labels as a short-hand to describe the qualities of a particular work is in its very nature, an appeal to a target audience. You tell someone you write horror to appeal to what you hope are their preconceptions of horror. If they like 'horror' then they'll like your work. If they don't, they'll know to stay away. On the other side, the person who sets out to write horror follows (or plays with) the conventions and 'qualities' of horror to appease or interact with the horror genre's target audience.

And as convoluted as my prattling may be, the truth of this is very simple. If you do not need to talk to anyone about your work, you do not need a genre. If you are not making marketing decisions, then you do not need short-hand to describe the qualities or conventions of your work. Once you do enter that arena of trying to gauge or find an audience's reaction to what your work is, then you absolutely need to be able to place your work in the pantheon of genre at some place. And this can be as simple as trying to tell your mother what your book is about. It doesn't have to be "Marketing", but all of the public interactions and short-hands are marketing.

I will perhaps concede that my definition of a 'marketing distinction' is perhaps to you as overreaching as your definition of 'genre' is to me. But we are also then confronted with another problem in the academic analogy. You are correct that both the lyric and the ballad are different, though both could be set to music. The problem is that neither of those are genres, they're forms. And that becomes especially problematic within literature (as opposed to music (at least until the 1950's) or the visual arts) because literature's only delineations for many (read thousands of) years were in form, though we called those genres (starting in the 18th century, which is when we started to use the word genre). Lest we forget that the 'novel' was a genre all to itself for many years. And now no one would call the novel a genre. So yes, academics were talking about genres for much longer than we have been talking about marketing, but what they called a genre is not what we now call a genre.

And even though now they may be talking about the same genres that we talk about, (you may be able to do a dissertation comparing southern gothic literature following the great depression and the great recession) those genres weren't invented by the academics to describe aesthetic developments. They were invented by marketers trying to sell work to target audiences.

Unless you want to have a discussion about the difference between genre and form, which is entirely different.

Part of me would enjoy debating, but the other part isn't sure — because throughout the entirety of your post you create a picture of history that is interesting, but as far as I can make sense of its ideas, it's false. It's not a "Well yes, but on the other hand..." or a "My opinion is..." — it's just false in some of its basic assumptions. And nobody likes to be "told" that they're wrong, and I would gain nothing from it, and neither would you. I'd look like a dick, maybe; what else would be accomplished?

It wouldn't be a debate, because we'd have to establish certain facts before even heading into debate territory. I just don't have any interest at all, AT ALL in looking at the history of literature (a term that until recently enough didn't mean what it means today at all anyway) and the history of "marketing in literature" and determining at what point it was possible for what you say here to sound like it has always been this way:

We don't put our works into genres because they share aesthetic similarities with other work in that genre. We put the genre label onto our work that it shares the most aesthetic similarities to, in order to appeal to that genre's market... or, if you find that particular phrasing too distasteful: using labels as a short-hand to describe the qualities of a particular work is in its very nature, an appeal to a target audience. You tell someone you write horror to appeal to what you hope are their preconceptions of horror. If they like 'horror' then they'll like your work. If they don't, they'll know to stay away.

So I'll drop it, politely, and hope you'll get that I appreciate your response.

You're basically saying that people use genres to classify works for both academic and commercial purposes, that academic and commercal genres are distinct sets which sometimes overlap, and that convenient distinctions (such as genre) help to effeciently describe works.

Yeah, I was afraid that my argument got away from me a bit. And I do think that this statement is true, but what I maintain is that using genres (in either setting) to talk about work is different from the process of labeling the works into a particular genre in the first place.

I just don't have any interest at all, AT ALL in looking at the history of literature (a term that until recently enough didn't mean what it means today at all anyway) and the history of "marketing in literature" and determining at what point it was possible for what you say here to sound like it has always been this way:

I apologize, I never intended it to seem that I thought it has always been this way. I think this is a very recent development - we have to have marketers before they can usurp the linedrawing processes - and I too have no interest in comparing the marketing techniques of Melville to the marketing techniques of Penguin Group to find exactly when that happened.

So I'll drop it, politely, and hope you'll get that I appreciate your response.

Fair enough.

oh, that's just the Appalachian trail version of Appalachia!

I live in the southern Gothic genre. One word: Memphis. City full of hate (race, religion, politics, guns. ect. ) so I can see the difference between the genre and sub-genre. It's the same difference, no matter how similar, as rock and southern rock musick.