I'm reading Wolf Hall right now.  It's the first book of three in Hilary Mantel's trilogy about Thomas Cromwell.

It feels pretty much like standard historical fiction so far.  Because the back story is so complicated (dear me, but the 15th and 16th-century English royal family trees are confusing), she has lot of different tricks to give it to us: characters just recalling it as (boring) internal monologue, dialogue, legend.  It's well written, but feels anachronistic in parts.  You know, historical fiction.  In high school, to avoid 11th-grade English, I took a course called "History through Literature", which was basically a course made up of historical fiction (we did read some Shakespeare), and sure, at various times over the course of my life, I've read quite a bit of it, though my preferred English period is around 350 years earlier.

And sure, Thomas Cromwell is pretty cool to learn about.

But I can't help but think it's a little much that both this book and its successor won the Man Booker Prize. 

And yet.

There's gender afoot.  Basically, I'm saying that I don't think that historical fiction, as a genre, is really literature.  (That's probably true. I probably don't.)  But of course, it's a genre mostly written by women, while "literature" is more often written by men. 

And yet I think it's good genre fiction.  And yet, I like musical theatre, not opera, and I think that "Show Boat" is as important as any opera.