My book is not 1893. It is 1887. I have a book that is 117 years old. I'm boggled.

Ye gods. And I care so much that my copy of Wuthering Heights is 55 years old.

No, it's not in a case at all (that was Mr. H's humidor, but I thought it made a good background). I picked it up at a booksale ages ago. I'm going through some of the other books on that shelf to see what else we've got.

Like,3 well preserved volumes of War and Peace from 1899.

I think the oldest book I have is Queechy by Elizabeth Wetherell, it's 1852.

King Solomon's Mine was first published in 1885/1886. Cool.

There's no date on mine. I had to go by the publisher and cover art.

t twitching in old, fancy book acquisitiveness So, um, Heather, where does that book live in your house? What's your address? t checking that "books" aren't listed in that list in the Ten Commandents with the ass and the wife and the maidservant

There's no date on mine. I had to go by the publisher and cover art.

Yeah, I actually don't think this Wuthering Heights is that old. The foreword is copyrighted 1959, and that's the only date given, but I just saw it's the tenth printing, so it's probably only thirty or forty years old. It's a Signet classic.

You can have my ass, connie, just not my book.

I keep meaning to get into the critcism=knowing what the actors do off-set. I think that's a bad analogy. We talk about Buffy in terms of not just what's on the screen, but what it says about the high school experience, growing up, pain, etc. We have arguments about the language. We talk about what it means that Angel grew up in a certain time and in a certain place and what Drusilla's religion meant to what she became as a vampire. We discuss what the show says about good and evil and all that lies in between. Soul having vs. not soul having. How is that different from picking apart a book?

Just because I happen to know that Cleanth Brook has to do with the critical examination of poetry as an experience of the moment, a hierarchical, rigid, one-answer-is-right-interpretation, has nothing to do with my rejection of my analysis of literature.

Really. Quit snickering.

Typo Boy is harder to answer.

Also, Heather.

I will study, however, on how to articulate that thoughts about Joss' (or any of the other marvelous scripting-gods') processes were not the key to appreciating Buffy.

Separating Firefly from a lifetime of genre-blinkers will take a little longer.

I honestly think "literary fiction" is too vague of a term, and its description too amorphous and subjective, to call it a genre or sub-genre. Any two people could read the same novel and disagree on whether the emphasis was on language over character, etc.

So how would you define "literary fiction"?

I've been out all day, so I just got to this question.

I wouldn't define "literary fiction" at all. I don't like the term. I think it's sufficiently vague enough that it implies "fiction that is well-written," versus, I suppose, "crap that Other People read." Okay, fine. Define "well-written." It's just too vague and entirely subjective.

"Literary fiction" as a designation just seems not at all like a definition, but more like an I Know It When I See It type of designation. How does one decide what's "literary" fiction and what's just plain non-literary fiction? Toni Morrison = literary fiction, it seems, but what about Jenny Crusie? Anne Lamott? Pat Conroy?