Agreed. This is similar to the sudden interest academia took to Science-fiction/Speculative fiction as a contender for “serious” literature. It’s actually quit

Agreed. This is similar to the sudden interest academia took to Science-fiction/Speculative fiction as a contender for “serious” literature. It’s actually quite amusing how literary fiction has become such a closed off place when the works its academic apparatus almost worships is, historically speaking, genre/popular fiction. Dickens was the equivalent of TV serials, Shakespeare was hardly high brow entertainment for its time (Ben Johnson was the court dramatist, not Shakespeare), and anything older than Chaucer didn’t even qualify as high literature simply for not being sacred/written in Latin. The ivory tower is getting scared of its own irrelevancy and rightly so.