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In 1990, the American Library Association published its Guidelines on Subject Access to Individual Works of Fiction, Drama, Etc. Neither the 1990 Guidelines nor the work's subsequent 2000 edition is terribly concerned with explaining why increased subject access to works of imaginative literature has come to be needed now more than in the baker's century after Cutter first allowed for such access. Inherent to the 1990 Guidelines is the notion that works of imagination have a value such that they deserve to be accessed in more or less the same manner that nonfiction works are accessed, through aboutness as well as whatness. The paper purports that the origins of this change in cataloging policy are far from humble, that they can in fact be located in a broad swath of social historiography and literary criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]