I liked this book, even if I'm not sure I understood it (a common occurance when I encounter something weird in literature: sometimes I think I want to like something more because I don't understand it but want to). The idea of graphing out literary genres in terms of their rise and fall is appealing for the simple fact that they put the lie to the notion that "we've always had [insert literary genre here] around." There's no doubt in my mind that, with certain literary genres, movements, and forms, history has a way of informing both their rise and fall. Formalism begat Structuralism, which begat Post-Structuralism (seems like you can create whole new schools of thought simply by adding "post-" to the front of existing realms), and so on. Literature doesn't happen in a vaccum, at least I'd like to think. Sometimes the world isn't ready for a particular genre, sometimes the genre isn't ready for the world.
The idea of mapping out literary locations, at least in terms of how they correspond to the text, was illustrated intriguingly enough with the "village novels" of the nineteenth century. We like to think of the past as somehow being less complicated than our present, with self-sufficient villages doting the landscape and safe havens from the problems of the outside world. But as the maps demonstrate, a lot of the outside world was encroaching on the villages at the time that PBS would have you think that villages were still universes into themselves (not Downton Abbey perhaps, but more like the Austen adaptations and other nineteenth-century-set projects, where the outside world only comes into play through letters or news from relatives about what a scoundrel this Napoleon Bonaparte fellow is being on the continent). Interconnectivity isn't an innovation of the twenty-first century; the world first began to shrink thanks to the telegraph, then the telephone, and other forms of communication brought into the same world that hosted Little Women or Moby-Dick.
I'm a sucker for graphs charting the rise and fall of things (I have never, ever liked math, but graphs give me something to envision to make sense of the numbers), and I keep going back to the graphs charting the rise of the modern novel through its various incarnations. It's surprising to me that the first wave of gothic fiction seemed to peter out around 1815, seeing as the novel I most associate with gothic fiction (Frankenstein) was published three years later. The tastes of the public have as much to do with the rise or fall of a genre, it seems; artistic merits be damned, if the public ain't buying it we need to cut back on the production. I'm a bit of a free-market capitalist when it comes to culture, because as stupid as a lot of popular things seem now I know from past experience (MC Hammer, Beverly Hills 90210, mullets) that eventually something will come along to replace it (that replacement might be equally stupid, but at least it's new and stupid, as opposed to old and stupid). Like I said about gothic fiction, it seemed to nosedive into irrelevance for most of the nineteenth century, but made a comeback via Dracula in the 1890s.
I'm guilty of thinking that Sherlock Holmes has been around for a long time (and technically he has), but I always find it surprising to see how recent his creation really was; in terms of overall history, the 1890s aren't that far away from our own time. The evolution of the clue (whether it was revealed in detective fiction or kept just off the page) was interesting to consider, as well as the names of Conan Doyle's contemporaries whose inability to adapt as well as he did meant their literary doom. Genres live or die by the best work of the master of the craft, and it's hard to think of a bigger name in the evolution of the detective genre than Arthur Conan Doyle (cameos in Shanghei Knights nonwithstanding). We always tend, in looking back on an author's career, to think that he or she was always that person, always that creative force who fashioned fantasies out pure air, with no one able to compete. It helps to know that Conan Doyle was, at one point, simply one of many authors applying himself to a genre that might or might not have led anywhere, if he'd not worked hard at it.
There are some works that need maps (Lord of the Rings, treasure-hunting or travelogue works) and there are some that don't. Graphs and trees are fantastic and weird ways to bring literature to life. I think I understood this book, but I'm not sure.
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