Formula Fiction
In literature and popular culture, formula fiction refers to storylines and plots that have been reused over and over again. It is similar to, but not necessarily identical to, genre fiction, which identifies a number of specific settings that are frequently reused. In literary criticism, the label of formula fiction is at least mildly pejorative and tends to imply lack of originality.
Genre fiction frequently involves elements of fantasy or wish fulfilment on the part of the readers. While the label of genre fiction is typically assigned because of the reuse of settings, the label of formula fiction is typically assigned because of the repeated use of plot devices and stock characters.
A genre like high fantasy, Westerns or science fiction space opera has a specific setting, like the Old West, or outer space. Approaching the genre, you have certain pieces of assumed background information covering the nature and purpose of dragons, warp drives, or shootouts at high noon, which are taken for granted by the genre conventions, and need not be explained for the reader anew.
The formula, by contrast, is not so much defined by setting as much as it is by narrative structure. Formulaic tales such as Adultery in Academia, My Jewish Childhood, or Beatniks Wandering the Midwest do not have fantastic settings, and plots which, if not entirely free from fantasy, do not assume the presence of magic or fantastic science. They do, however, represent plots that have been reused so often as to become easily recognisable as formulas. Perhaps the most clearly formulaic plots define the romantic comedy; hang this label on a book or film, and you already know its plot.
There is some overlap between genre fiction and formula fiction; romance novels and espionage thrillers seldom use fantastic science or magic, and are often set in plausible worlds of the present or past, but their conventions are well defined enough that they have enough stock apparatus that they are considered forming a recognisable genre.
In film, the reuse of similar settings and plot motifs is called the Hollywood cycles.
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Referenced By
Hollywood Cycles
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