In rereading FAS, I got to thinking about Thursday's escape from The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco as it is being erased, and the book she arrives in, Cold Comfort Farm. (The escape is wonderfully done, in my opinion--since nothing textual can survive in the Nothing, of course it can't be described textually, so it has to be illustrated instead.) Anyway, I was curious about the book, which I'd never heard of, and looked it up.
Wikipedia describes it as a comic novel that parodied "the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time", so its genre could best be described as literary parody.
This is intriguing to me because Jasper's books are, of course, extremely hard to characterize as being in one genre or another, and I could make a case for putting them in mystery, action, comedy, sci-fi/fantasy, etc., along with literary parody. But I wouldn't say that parody is the main genre, since after all most of the time they're not making fun of the books but treating them with irreverent respect. Also, the sci-fi/action/mystery/satire elements are as much a part of what makes the books what they are as the literary references. But since books of the same genre are found in close proximity, this implies that the Thursday Next books
are primarily in the genre of parody. What do you think?