Lit Crit Terminology question

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?

One Year Ago

. . . indifference, incompetence, and an unassailable sense of entitlement nearly killed one of the United States' most important cities.

Go read the step-by-step account of the disaster.

Go watch this musical howl. (And to the song which inspired it, and of the disaster which remade America.)

Go read.

New Orleans isn't optional; as long as the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico, there will be a city near its mouth, and the narrow spit of land between Lake Pontchartrain and the river is the most sensible place for it. New Orleans is a national treasure in large part because it is a national resource. We can't act like it was a mistake to build there, and we can't turn away from the task of rebuilding.

And we can't let the people who tried to kill it get away clean.