Go ahead and get a cup of tea, this might go on for a while.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the literary marketplace as a fiction writer and literary scholar, pondering questions like, does the buying and selling of art for money detract from aesthetics? What pressures does the marketplace put on writers? What types of fiction (in terms of form and content) will perform well on the market? Are literary gatekeepers (e.g., editors, publishers, marketing people, critics, agents, etc.) correct in their assessments about marketability? And so on.
One of the determinations and often-repeated truisms is that readers don’t like political books. (ETA: it’s two years since I wrote this, but this post at AAR is an excellent example of someone complaining about authors “adding” politics to romance novels.) Many believe readers won’t read about politics and, more broadly, they don’t like books that directly address inequities, social justice, organizations and belief structures (e.g., churches, capitalism), and so on.
This idea may be related to the stagnation in historical romantic fiction that’s been widely explored in the past month (see for example this recent post at Dear Author). A novel about upper-class white people in the Regency period tends to be seen as apolitical and thus preferable to a novel about upper-class white people in Africa in the early 20th century (which reeks of colonialism), for example.
I’d like to offer a response to the truism arguing for a different, more expansive, notion of the political. I’m invested in this question because the books I’ve written outside the mainstream vis-a-vis the political, but also because I think it’s pertinent to how we see the genre.
Emma Barry 