Lit Crit Terminology question

[womzilla]

Background:

My friend Poppy Brite has, for several years, been writing stories about members of the Stubbs Family of New Orleans; the first published book featuring the Stubbses was The Value of X in 2002. But much more prominent are the three novels Liquor (2004), Prime (2005), and Soul Kitchen (2006).

docbrite settles a question that someone had to have been actually debating:

Debate or no, I feel qualified to have the last word on this: The Value of X is not part of the Liquor series because it predates Liquor, the restaurant, by ten years.

Poppy then goes on to use the phrase "the larger group of fiction I refer to as the Stubbs family stories" and then, somewhat under erasure, "Liquorverse" (to refer to the novella D*U*C*K, which is not quite consistent with the Liquorverse novels).

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that there are no standard critical terms for overlapping fictions which are not part of a single coherent work. I mean, there's "series" for clearly related stories which are published and intended to be read in a specific order (the "Rabbit Angstrom" series); there's "cycle", which is for clearly related stories with a loose (or no) narrative order, like a collection of Greek myths, though it is also widely used as a more respectable synonym for "series". And that's it. There's no term for things like Faulkner's "apocryphal county" of Yoknapatawpha, a setting and set of characters that weave in and out of almost all of his connected and unconnected stories. And there's no term for the novel that is made of up separately published shorter pieces.

Or, more correctly, there are no terms for these things outside of the fantastic fiction ghetto. In the ghetto, we have "continuity" or "universe" for places like Yoknapatawpha and Dragaera, and "fix-up" for books like Go Down, Moses or Life During Wartime. I don't find any of these terms completely satisfying--both "continuity" and "universe" seem to me to describe aspects of stories with shared settings/characters but not the sets of stories themselves, and the term "fix-up" has always seemed pejorative. But we need terms like this, because with their proper use, the question Poppy posed (and solved) goes away almost immediately--The Value of X is in the Stubbs "universe", but is not part of the "Liquor" series.

I suspect these terms don't exist outside of the ghetto because I recently had occasion to ask a comics scholar who is also a Faulknerian--Professor M. Thomas Inge--whether such terms existed, and he didn't know of such. Does anyone?

Comments

[schulman.livejournal.com]

I've seen "milieu" used outside the ghetto, but I couldn't tell you where.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

"Fix-up" doesn't seem pejorative to me, but my understanding may be idiosyncratic.

[avram]

Do we really need such terms? Is it actually inconvenient to say “the Stubbs family stories” instead of “the Stubbs family [nonexistent_word]”?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Ursula K. Le Guin was once in need of a word for a book of distantly related stories, such as her own Searoad or Four Ways to Forgiveness, which are set in the same fictional milieu but do not form a continuous or stitched narrative as a fix-up does. After considering "cranford" (after Mrs. Gaskell's book which also fits the description), she borrowed a musical term and settled on "story suite".

That's best for a single book, though, so it connects to your problem but does not directly answer it.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I use "sequence" as in The Fall Revolution sequence in which one book is an alternative history to two of the others, but story stuite also works. I think Peter Straub uses "sequence" for his books.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

How do people talk about Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon body-of-work, then ?

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

The Balzac scholars I've read--and Balzac was the first author to create his own fictional universe spanning numerous books--use words like "universe" and "world," rather than a LitCrit neologism.

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

Is "cycle" not the usual word? I could have sworn I'd heard it used exactly that way. You'd talk about the Stubbs Family cycle or the Yoknapatawpha cycle.