Last month, when the fiction finalists for the National Book Awards were announced, one stood out from the rest: “Station Eleven,” by Emily St. John Mandel. While the other nominated books are what, nowadays, we call “literary fiction,” “Station Eleven” is set in a familiar genre universe, in which a pandemic has destroyed civilization. The twist—the thing that makes “Station Eleven” National Book Award material—is that the survivors are artists.

Mandel’s book cuts back and forth between the present, when the outbreak is unfolding, and a post-apocalyptic future, when the survivors are beginning to rebuild. In the present, actors are putting on a production of “King Lear,” and a woman is writing and illustrating her own comic book—a mournful science-fiction story set on a malfunctioning, planet-sized spaceship called Station Eleven. (The comic book sounded so interesting that I searched for it on Amazon—unfortunately, it’s fictional.) Meanwhile, in the future, a group of survivors have formed the Travelling Symphony, a wagon train that travels the wasteland, performing Shakespeare and Vivaldi in the parking lots of looted Walmarts. (“People want what was best about the world,” one man says.) Eventually, past and present converge: a few issues of the comic book outlive the chaos, and end up influencing the survivors just as much as “Lear” or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“Station Eleven,” in other words, turns out not to be a genre novel so much as a novel about genre. Unlike Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” which asked what would remain after the collapse of culture, “Station Eleven” asks how culture gets put together again. It imagines a future in which art, shorn of the distractions of celebrity, pedigree, and class, might find a new equilibrium. The old distinctions could be forgotten; a comic book could be as influential as Shakespeare. It’s hard to imagine a novel more perfectly suited, in both form and content, to this literary moment. For a while now, it’s looked as though we might be headed toward a total collapse of the genre system. We’ve already been contemplating the genre apocalypse that “Station Eleven” imagines.

It’s hard to talk in a clear-headed way about genre. Almost everyone can agree that, over the past few years, the rise of the young-adult genre has highlighted a big change in book culture. For reasons that aren’t fully explicable (Netflix? Tumblr? Kindles? Postmodernism?), it’s no longer taken for granted that important novels must be, in some sense, above, beyond, or “meta” about their genre. A process of genrefication is occurring.

That’s where the agreement ends, however. If anything, a divide has opened up. The old guard looks down on genre fiction with indifference; the new arrivals—the genrefiers—are eager to change the neighborhood, seeing in genre a revitalizing force. Partisans argue about the relative merits of “literary fiction” and “genre fiction.” (In 2012, Arthur Krystal, writing in this magazine, argued for literary fiction’s superiority; he fielded a pro-genre-fiction riposte from Lev Grossman, in Time.) And yet confusion reigns in this debate, which feels strangely vague and misformulated. It remains unclear exactly what the terms “literary fiction” and “genre fiction” mean. A book like “Station Eleven” is both a literary novel and a genre novel; the same goes for “Jane Eyre” and “Crime and Punishment.” How can two contrasting categories overlap so much? Genres themselves fall into genres: there are period genres (Victorian literature), subject genres (detective fiction), form genres (the short story), style genres (minimalism), market genres (“chick-lit”), mode genres (satire), and so on. How are different kinds of genres supposed to be compared? (“Literary fiction” and “genre fiction,” one senses, aren’t really comparable categories.) What is it, exactly, about genre that is unliterary—and what is it in “the literary” that resists genre? The debate goes round and round, magnetic and circular—a lovers’ quarrel among literati.

To a degree, the problem is that genre is inherently confusing and complex. But history confuses things, too. The distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction is neither contemporary nor ageless. It’s the product of modernism, and it bears the stamp of a unique time in literary history.

The relationship between novelists and genre has shifted several times, often in ways that seem strange to us today. In 1719, when “Robinson Crusoe” appeared, many people considered “the novel,” in itself, to be a genre. The novel was a new thing—a long, fictitious, drama-filled work of prose—and its competitors were other prose genres: histories, biographies, political tracts, sermons, testimonies about travel to far-off lands. What set the novel apart from those other prose genres was its ostentatious fictitousness. When Catherine Morland, the heroine of Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” is rebuked for reading too many Gothic novels, the proposed alternative isn’t “literary fiction” but non-fiction (a friend suggests she try history). “Northanger Abbey” was written in 1799. In England, “Middlemarch” is often cited as the first novel you didn’t have to be embarrassed about reading. It was published in 1872.

A vast cultural and technological distance separates “Robinson Crusoe” and “Middlemarch.” Between those two books, modernity and mass culture were born. Bookselling became a big business, as did culture in general. Realism appeared and ascended. The novel splintered; it came to seem less like a genre in itself, and more like all of literature except for poetry. It grew to contain genres: “Journey to the Center of the Earth” was published in 1864; “A Study in Scarlet” introduced Sherlock Holmes, in 1887; “Dracula” was published a decade later. Over time, the novel attained respectability and became an institution. At the top of that institutional hierarchy the social novelists, like Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, pulled away from the eccentricities of the Victorians; they aimed to recreate, in novel form, the non-fiction prose that the novel had displaced. By 1924, Virginia Woolf was complaining about the stuffy, intellectualized sanctimoniousness of those books. To finish them, she said, “it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque.” The big-time novelists, she went on, “have developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.”

The modernists saw, correctly, that novel-writing, once an art, had become an enterprise. More fundamentally, it had internalized a mass view of life—a view in which what matters are social facts rather than individual experiences. It had become affiliated with manufactured culture, with the crowd, and with the sentimentality and repetitive stylization that crowds, in their quest for a common identity, often crave. In reaction, they created a different kind of literature: one centered on inwardness, privacy, and incommunicability. The new books were about individuals, and they needed to be interpreted individually. Instead of being public resources, novels would be private sanctuaries. Instead of being social, they would be spiritual.

Something of that spiritual aura still hovers around our sense of what it means to read and write “literary fiction.” And there are some ways in which the modernist critique of mass literature is just as trenchant today as it was back then. (The modernists never got to see “fandom”; if they had, I doubt they’d be pleased.) On the whole, though, we live in a different world. Today, the novel isn’t an ossified institution; it’s an uncertain one. (Television is the prestige medium; it’s where the “social novelists” work.) Literature has moved on: the books we now regard as “literary fiction” are actually very different from those the modernists sought to create and elevate. They are more diverse, and more extroverted. And mass culture has also changed. It’s been replaced by what Louis Menand describes as “a great river of pop, soulful, demotic, camp, performative, outrageous, over-the-top cultural goods”—in short, by pop culture. The distinction between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction” accurately captured the modernists’ literary reality. But, for better and for worse, it doesn’t capture ours.