Paraliterature comprises written works dismissed as not literary.
[1][2]:361 The term was originally used in French literary studies to 'designate a phenomenon characteristic of the age of mass communications - the fantastic spread of a mass literature', and as early as 1970 a special collection of critical articles on paraliterature appeared in France.
[3]:95-96 Art critic and scholar Rosalind Krauss brought the term to prominence In the United States through her text 'Poststructuralism and the "Paraliterary"' (1980).
[4] Krauss argues the paraliterary is 'the space of debate, quotation, partisanship, betrayal, reconciliation; but it is not the space of unity, coherence, or resolution that we think of as constituting the work of literature.
'[4]:37 On the term "paraliterature", Ursula K. Le Guin commented that "it exists.