That's funny. I remember when it seemed that QB seemed overly concentrated on long prose for literature. Certainly, post-1950 lit questions are dominated by novels and novelists. There are several axes on which to consider literature. One is by genre (poetry,drama, prose, novels, short fiction, non-fiction, etc.), another is temporal, and a third is geographic or lingual. Although most people would ideally want to distribute well across all three axes, in practice, one might be forced to compromise on others. Most distributions as currently written betray a preference for geography as the main level of analysis. I admit that I personally am more concerned about genre differences than time or country of origin, and would prefer to slight the latter two in preference to diversity in the first. But, there are multiple ways to craft distributions and subdistributions, each valid in its own ways. At 10:38 AM 2/12/02 PST, grapesmoker wrote: >STI said: > >>>And, considering ~only~ time period, what percentage of literature Qs should cover the 20th century? > >This is an interesting question. This Sunday, I went to the local used bookstore and bought 11 books (for $17, it was a good deal). All of those books were written in the 20th century, but I'd really have to stretch to try and remember the last time any of those books came up. In general, most of QB literature seems to very heavily favor the 17th - 19th centuries, with more emphasis on poetry and drama than novels. That, of course, has just been my perception, garnered from the packets I've heard, but I do get the feeling that 20th century literature usually gets the shaft in QB.
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