Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction

K e y C o n c e p t s i n L i t e r at u r e
‘Bernice M. Murphy’s excellent guide to the rapidly changing field
of contemporary popular fiction explores every nook and cranny
from “Aga Sagas” to Zombie fiction, leaving no stone unturned.
Theoretically acute, historically informed and written with
immense verve, this is an indispensable and, above all, accessible
introduction that is certain to reach a wide and diverse readership.’
David Glover, University of Southampton

A jargon-free guide to the key terms, concepts and

theoretical approaches to contemporary popular fiction
Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction represents an invaluable starting point for
students wishing to familiarise themselves with this exciting and rapidly evolving area of
literary studies. It provides an accessible, concise and reliable overview of core critical
terminology, key theoretical approaches, and the major genres and sub-genres within
popular fiction. Because popular fiction is significantly shaped by commercial forces, the
book also provides critical and historical contexts for terminology related to e-books,
e-publishing and self-publishing platforms. By focusing in particular on post-2000 trends
in popular fiction, the book provides a truly up-to-date snapshot of the subject area and
Bernice M. Murphy
its critical contexts.
Key Features
• Provides an engaging and knowledgeable overview of critical terminology and

Key
theoretical approaches used by critics working within the field
• Introduces readers to the most recent trends and newest terms, including ‘Nordic
Noir’, ‘New Adult Fiction’, ‘Cli-Fi’ (Climate Change Fiction), ‘Domestic Noir’ and
‘Flash Fiction’ as well as significant terms related to fanfiction and web-publishing
platforms such as WattPad
• Includes an annotated further reading list to entries on crime, horror, romance,
fantasy, the thriller, science fiction and comic books/graphic novels
• Supplies a chronology, providing readers with a historical overview of the major
popular novels, critical approaches and technological innovations
Bernice M. Murphy is lecturer in Popular Literature and director of the MPhil in
Bernice M. Murphy
Concepts in
Popular Literature at the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin. She has published
extensively on topics related to popular fiction. Recent books include The Highway Horror
Film (2014) and The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture (2013). Contemporary
Popular Fiction
Cover image: © Shutterstock.com
Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com

ISBN 978-1-4744-1105-9

edinburghuniversitypress.com
 KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY
POPULAR FICTION

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 Key Concepts in Literature

Published titles
Key Concepts in Literary Theory, 3rd edition
Julian Wolfreys et al.

Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction

Bernice M. Murphy

Forthcoming titles
Key Concepts in the Gothic
William Hughes

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 Key Concepts
in Contemporary Popular
Fiction

Bernice M. Murphy

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 Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in
the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject
areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge
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works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
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© Bernice M. Murphy, 2017

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The right of Bernice M. Murphy to be identified as the author of this

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 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1
A–Z of Key Concepts and Terms 15
Key Critical and Theoretical Approaches to Popular Fiction 83
Major Popular Genres 115
Fifteen Key Works of Contemporary Popular Fiction 131
Chronology of Selected Key Dates in Popular Fiction 139
Works Cited in A–Z Listing of Key Concepts and Terms 146

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MURPHY 9781474411035 PRINT.indd 6 28/11/2016 09:23
 Acknowledgements

I would like to begin by thanking Jackie Jones at EUP for asking me to

write this volume in the first place: it’s been a fantastic opportunity. The
continued support and encouragement of my colleagues in the TCD
School of English, and in particular, Stephen Matterson, Darryl Jones,
Helen Conrad O’Briain and Diane Sadler, is also very much appreci-
ated. I was able to write much of this book during a period of study
leave granted by the college in 2015, for which I am very grateful. The
students from the MPhil in Popular Literature and my ‘Contemporary
Popular Literature’ class frequently served as test subjects for some
of the material published here: their good-natured enthusiasm was
always heartening and illuminating. As ever, my family and friends
were patient and supportive, even when pushed to the limits of sanity
by my constant mutterings about zombies, mass culture and Amazon.
com. This book is dedicated to my fellow ‘Pop Lit’ lecturers Clare
Clarke, Jarlath Killeen and Elizabeth McCarthy. They are excellent
academics, even better colleagues and valued friends.

Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College Dublin

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MURPHY 9781474411035 PRINT.indd 8 28/11/2016 09:23
 Introduction

Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction is intended to serve as

an accessible starting point for students, scholars and general readers
looking for an authoritative and concise introduction to this increas-
ingly significant field of literary study. It provides a succinct overview
of the most significant critical terms and theoretical approaches used
within popular fiction studies at the present time. Because the focus
here is also on the contemporary, particular effort has been made to
provide an insight into trends and terms related to twenty-first-century
popular fiction. However, one cannot understand the current state of
popular fiction without also engaging with the prior historical, cul-
tural, commercial and academic contexts of the subject area, and so
these elements have also been taken into consideration.
Before outlining the structure of this volume in more detail, it is
important briefly to outline just what we mean by the term ‘popular
fiction’ in the first place. This is actually a slightly trickier task that
you might initially think. As David Glover and Scott McCracken put
it:

‘Popular fiction’ is a deceptively simple phrase, at once indispensible and

commonplace, yet often left unsettlingly vague. One of the problems with
finding a clear definition of popular fiction is that the subject of study is
not always clear. The cultural formation designated by ‘popular fiction’
has changed over time and varies according to its cultural and geographical
situation. (2012: 1)

The most straightforward understanding of the term, as has often

rightly been pointed out, is to take it as meaning ‘fiction that is
­popular’ – as opposed to works of fiction that remain unread by the
vast majority of the reading public (see, for instance, Ashley 1997: 2;
Berberich 2015: 2; Glover and McCracken 2012: 1; Gelder 2004: 20;
and McCracken 1998: 1).

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 2  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

However, there are problems with this definition. As Ken Gelder

puts it, ‘Authors of literary fiction can have bestsellers, too, and con-
versely, not every work of popular fiction sells successfully’ (2004:
3). Indeed, some novels categorised as ‘literary’ rather than ‘popular’
fiction do achieve a wide readership and considerable commercial suc-
cess (and here, works by authors such as Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan,
Donna Tartt and Jonathan Franzen come to mind). Then there is the
fact that as the melancholy remainders section of any major book-
shop, or the lowest ranks of the Amazon.com sales ranking system
will attest, there are many works of popular fiction that don’t find
many readers or sell many copies. So this is why thinking of ‘popular-
ity’ primarily in terms of sales, or commercial visibility, is a mistake,
even if consideration of these factors is still an important facet of the
study of popular fiction.
Another way critics and academics have discussed the meaning
of the term ‘popular fiction’ is to relate it to the assumed audience
these kinds of texts attract. For instance, Christina Berberich, echoing
Glover and McCracken, rightly notes that ‘the term “popular” con-
tains a variety of different, and potentially contradictory, meanings,
and is one weighed down with ideological meaning’ (2015: 3). She
then cites pioneering cultural studies critic Raymond Williams, who
in his 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society,
‘defines “popular” as, historically, “belonging to the people,” “widely
favoured” or “well liked” but points out that it has always held the
connotation of being “low” or “base” [. . .]’ (2015: 3). Williams him-
self continues:

Popular was being seen from the point of view of the people rather than
from those seeking favour or power over them. Yet the earlier sense has not
died. Popular culture was not identified by the people but by others, and it
still carries two older senses: inferior kinds of work (c.f. popular literature,
popular press as distinguished from quality press); and work deliberately
setting out to win favour (popular journalism as distinguished from demo-
cratic journalism, or popular entertainment): as well as the more modern
sense of being liked by many people, with which, of course, in many cases,
the earlier senses overlap. (1983: 237, emphasis in original)

This definition is important for us here not only because it refers

to the long-standing association between the ‘popular’ and cul-
tural products which are of poor quality, and pander to the lowest

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 INTRODUCTION  3

common denominator, it also emphasises the link between the ‘pop-

ular’ and the widest possible audience. Popular fiction has often been
associated with the ‘common people’, and hence with the ‘lower’ or
‘working’ classes, as well as the ever-widening ranks of the middle
classes, in large part because of the real-life historical development
of this form of literature. As Clive Bloom has observed, the develop-
ment of genre fiction in the UK is inherently linked to the advent of
mass literacy in the late nineteenth century. ‘The market amongst
lower-middle class and working-class readers was effectively created
when rising incomes, increasing leisure, and greater national cohe-
sion aligned with reasonable levels of reading ability’ (2008: 45). An
earlier critic of popular fiction, Victor Neuburg, also noted that the
‘progressive growth of the reading public’ had begun by the end of
the eighteenth century, and that the age of ‘mass-produced litera-
ture’ had begun by end of the nineteenth (1977: 15). Back in 1957,
Margaret Dalziel began her study of mid-Victorian popular fiction
by arguing that the increasing literacy during this period had created
an avid audience of ‘lower class people’, many of whom ‘lived lives
of unspeakable degradation’. She continued, ‘What they wanted was
not cheap knowledge but cheap amusement, not information but
fiction’, thereby suggesting that this kind of fiction was primarily a
kind of tawdry distraction for those occupying the lowest rungs of
Victorian society (12).
However, as the Key Critical and Theoretical Approaches sec-
tion of this volume will demonstrate, it is not only the working-class
relationship with popular fiction that has attracted scholarly interest
(and, frequently, concern and even outright disapproval): the likes
of Matthew Arnold, Q. D. Leavis, F. R. Leavis, Dwight Macdonald,
Pierre Bourdieu and, more recently, cultural critics such as Curtis
White and Chris Hedges, have also discussed the impact that they see
popular reading material and ‘mass culture’ having upon the middle-
class audience as well.
In the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, it becomes
clear that despite this longstanding historical association with the
working class in particular, readers of popular fiction can and do
belong to every social class, income and education level, although the
question of who, exactly, constitutes the main readership of particular
genres does significantly vary depending on what genre one is referring
to. Furthermore, as the emergence of self-publishing and digital distri-
bution platforms contributes to an ever more expansive marketplace

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 4  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

in which the idea of specific narratives calibrated to the reading pref-

erences and prejudices of the individual reader becomes increasingly
achievable, the question of who reads what kind of genre fiction (and
for what reasons) becomes all the complex. It is more helpful then
for the critic of contemporary popular fiction, as Scott McCracken
presciently suggested back in 1998, to look instead ‘at the relationship
between a particular audience (or coalition of reader groups) and a
particular text or genre’ (5) rather than try to make overly broad con-
clusions about the readership of popular fiction in general.
This is all very well, but it still leaves the question of ‘What is
popular fiction?’ hanging. Thankfully, the critical consensus of the last
couple of decades has arrived at some broad points of general agree-
ment, which I have summarised below in eight key points.

1. Works of Popular Fiction are Aimed at a General Audience

It can be taken as a given that a work of popular fiction has been
expressly written for a general rather than an elite audience (in con-
trast with literary fiction, which, as we shall see in the Key Critical
and Theoretical Approaches section, has often been associated with
an ‘elite’ and ‘cultivated’ minority). ‘A writer produces popular fiction
because he or she intends (or would prefer) to reach a large number
of readers,’ Gelder argues (2004: 22). Accessibility, affordability and
commercial availability are also considered to be important associated
aspects of the ‘popular’ text: it stands to reason that in order to reach
a general audience, a text should have a high degree of that hard-to-
define but important quality known as ‘readability’, and that it should
not be prohibitively priced or impossible to find.

2. Popular Fiction is Entertaining and Escapist

It has often been asserted that popular fiction’s primary purpose
is to entertain. Literary fiction has many times been described as
‘serious’ fiction, a description that often brings with it the unspoken
assumption that popular fiction is essentially ‘unserious’, i.e. frivolous,
light-weight and intellectually unfulfilling – the literary equivalent of
high-calorie, low-quality fast food. It has also long been common to
refer to popular fiction’s appeal in terms that emphasise its explicitly
escapist, supposedly ‘drug-like’ qualities. When readers and critics
refer to a work of fiction as a ‘compulsive read’, or a ‘page turner’, or

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 INTRODUCTION  5

describe themselves as ‘devouring’ a new novel, or ‘losing themselves’

in a story, they are highlighting the connection between engaging with
a popular text and the desire to temporarily escape from the ‘real’
world. One of the attractions of digital publishing is that it facilitates
instant access to an author’s back catalogue, a technological inno-
vation which not only privileges the ‘impulse’ buy, but which also
enables the kind of ‘binge’ more commonly associated with the online
streaming of TV shows. It is precisely this kind of immersive and
diverting quality that represents one of popular fiction’s most engag-
ing and remarked upon characteristics.

3. Popular Fiction is Easy to Identify

Works of popular fiction can almost always be quickly assigned to a
particular generic category, or categories. Indeed, ‘popular fiction’ and
‘genre fiction’ are now often said to be essentially the same thing, even
though the commercial classification of popular fiction into a specific
‘genre system’ (as we would recognise it today) didn’t really get under
way until the late nineteenth century (Glover and McCracken 2012:
28; Pittard 2015: 12). What this means is when a reader picks up a
work of popular fiction, be it a crime novel, a mystery or a romance,
they have certain pre-existing expectations about the basic character
types and plot elements that it will contain. As Gelder puts it, ‘with
popular fiction, generic identities are always visible’ (2004: 42). This
generic visibility even extends to the presentation of the novel in ques-
tion itself: when it comes to popular fiction, you really can usually
judge a book by its cover.
As well as having cover art that tends to encourage certain generic
expectations (for instance, it has often been noted that Chick-Lit
covers often have ‘frothy’ covers which emphasise accessories such as
shoes and handbags), novels categorised as ‘genre fiction’ tend to be
displayed alongside volumes belonging to the same genre or sub-genre
in book stores (be they online or physical), often have the name of
the genre itself written on the spine or on the cover, and frequently
have their generic identity clearly identified in the blurb and other
marketing materials (e.g. ‘A heart-stopping thriller in the tradition
of The Silence of the Lambs’). Interestingly, our expectations and
prior familiarity with plot elements, themes or tropes do not interfere
with our enjoyment of the text (unless it fails to engage or satisfy us
for some reason). Popular fiction therefore gratifies in part because it

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 6  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

provides us with what we want, or, as some critics would argue, with
what we have been conditioned to think we want.

4. Popular Fiction Doesn’t Have to be Particularly Original

The moment that a genre novel achieves a certain level of critical and
commercial success, it will almost certainly inspire a host of imitators.
This was the case even in the early days: in 1764, Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto created the blueprint for the gothic genre.
Within a matter of months, a rash of texts ‘inspired’ by Otranto
had begun to appear (Jane Austen even mocks some of them in her
satirical 1817 novel Northanger Abbey). Publishers and authors have
therefore always reasonably assumed that if the readers have lapped
up one kind of novel, they will probably be interested in three more
just like it. For instance, the success of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 bestseller
Gone Girl on both sides of the Atlantic meant that within a year or
so, domestic thrillers about unreliable women trapped in unfulfilling
or dangerous relationships had become a staple of the bestseller lists.
Many of them also had the word ‘girl’ in the title, despite the fact
that almost all of these books revolve around the domestic travails
of grown women (for this trend, we can also thank Stieg Larsson).
Even though many of these novels were no doubt written (or at least
planned) before Flynn’s book achieved cultural ubiquity, publishers
were happy to make sure that they were marketed and packaged in
such a way as to springboard off her success, sometimes spectacularly
so: in 2015 Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train actually beat Gone
Girl’s sales in both the US and UK. Similarly, huge sales for Fifty
Shades of Grey in 2011 and 2012 resulted in the release of a flood of
erotic novels with similarly monochrome covers. Compounding the
feedback loop of pop fiction influence was the fact that E. L. James’s
series had itself had started life as Twilight fanfiction. One hit will
always inspire another.

5. Popular Fiction is Plot Driven

One of the characteristics often said to distinguish popular fiction
from literary fiction is the fact that plot is always more important
than language, style or tone. It is not uncommon for a work of lit-
erary fiction to feature a plot in which, on the surface, not all that
much happens. However, a work of popular fiction in which plot

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 INTRODUCTION  7

is entirely secondary to stylistic concerns would, however, likely be

considered a disappointment by most readers. Popular novels are fre-
quently crammed with incident, and often have complicated, intricate
plots (this particularly is the case with certain genres in particular,
such as the thriller, which thrives on narrative reversals and twists).
This is certainly not to say, however, that a work of popular fiction
cannot have distinctive language or tonal and stylistic characteristics
(as the often parodied – because they are so recognisable – examples of
authors such as Raymond Chandler, H. P. Lovecraft and Dan Brown
amply demonstrate).

6. Popular Fiction is Shaped by Commercial and Technological

Considerations
Commercial, industrial and technological factors are always key com-
ponents in the creation, distribution, reception and analysis of popular
fiction (to characterise literary fiction as being entirely unaffected by
these factors would be inaccurate, but they are generally understood
to be less significant). Popular fiction as we understand it today would
not exist had it not been for the introduction in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries of cheaper and more efficient publication technol-
ogies which facilitated the production and distribution of affordable
reading materials targeted at the widest audience possible. Similarly,
the post-1930s ‘paperback revolution’ also owed much to advances in
printing technology, wider distribution channels and reductions in the
price of paper.
The last decade has seen another revolution in popular fiction
brought about by the advent of digital publishing and the rapid pro-
liferation of online publication and distribution venues, as well as the
arrival of more affordable and efficient e-reading devices. However, in
yet another sign of the fast-moving nature of the industry, these have
already been displaced, with current industry trends showing that
younger readers prefer to read their e-books on apps downloaded to
multi-purpose devices such as tablets and smart phones. The writing,
marketing, selling and distribution of popular fiction in both hard
copy and electronic format has also been profoundly affected by the
commercial dominance of one company in particular, Amazon.com.
To fully engage with the subject area, one must therefore be aware of
these historical, industrial and commercial trends.

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 8  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

7. Popular Fiction is Ephemeral

Shaped as it is by the ever-shifting tides of popular taste, the landscape
of popular fiction is a constantly evolving one. Although the general
outlines of most of today’s major genres were by and large established
before the end of the Victorian era (although they would all undergo
significant reconfigurations in the twentieth century), specific fads and
fashions will always arise in response to particular historical and
cultural moments. Just as established genres and sub-genres can fall
out of fashion – the Western is often cited as the most notable exam-
ple – so too can new ones emerge (although they are almost always
recognisably derived from existing genres). Two of the most notable
recent examples include ‘Cli-Fi’, or ‘Climate Change Fiction’, a science
fiction sub-genre focusing on the causes, effects and consequences
of environmental catastrophe, and the post-2000 rise to commercial
prominence of Urban Fantasy, which combines elements of fantasy,
horror, noir and adventure. As the emergence of ‘Cli-Fi’ in particular
suggests, popular fiction can and does evolve in response to pressing
contemporary anxieties and real-world events. Furthermore, whilst
publishing trends and reader preferences may wax and wane over the
decades, as Gary Hoppenstand argues, the transitory qualities of these
kinds of fictions are also significantly ‘mitigated by a number of pow-
erful narrative storylines that have survived the historical eras of their
invention to become part of the larger collective social consciousness,
not only reflecting our attitudes and beliefs (about such concepts as
love, heroism and death), but influencing them as well’ (2016: 119).

8. Popular Fiction is Part of the Wider Landscape of Popular Culture

Popular fiction has always had a symbiotic relationship with other
forms of popular culture, and no study of popular fiction can – or
should – entirely divorce itself from these contexts. Indeed, many of
the most significant post-1960s discussions of popular fiction were
conducted by academics who were operating from within a cultural
studies or communication studies perspective rather than as literary
scholars (although this has changed in recent years). In addition, as
Scott McCracken has noted, ‘Contemporary popular fiction is the
product of a huge entertainment industry. Written fiction is only part
of that industry, which markets and sells popular narratives for film,
radio, television and periodicals as well as in book form. To study

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 INTRODUCTION  9

popular fiction is to study only a small part of popular culture’ (1998:

1). There has always been considerable cross-fertilisation between
popular fiction and other forms of popular culture. Best-selling popu-
lar novels were frequently (and not always with the author’s permis-
sion) adapted for the stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:
film adaptations of popular novels have been a staple of the cinema
since the very beginnings of the medium, and radio plays, television
shows and pop songs have all influenced (or been influenced by) popu-
lar fiction.
To cite one recent example of this kind of movement between medi-
ums: the past decade has seen the emergence of the superhero narra-
tive as one of the most ubiquitous trends in contemporary popular
culture. The international box-office has been dominated by Marvel
properties since Iron Man was released in 2008, and now there are a
whole raft of superhero TV films and shows based on both Marvel
and DC characters, some aimed at the more ‘family friendly’ section
of the audience, some carefully calibrated for a more self-consciously
‘mature’ demographic.
There has also been a significant but, to date, rather overlooked
popular fiction component to this trend: dozens of novels based on
both existing and original characters have been published in the
past decade. In short, a variety of pop culture narrative previously
most commonly associated with the comic book/graphic novel only
(albeit incorrectly, as there had been superhero radio shows, seri-
als and cartoons since the 1940s) has made the transition to main-
stream pop-­culture ubiquity on the big screen, the small screen and the
bookshelves, and the relationship between these properties remains a
deeply symbiotic one, even when the novels concerned involve entirely
original characters and scenarios (as many of them do).
The Internet age has also brought with it a whole new adjunct to
the entertainment industry. Blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and
online review sites such as Goodreads and Amazon customer reviews
facilitate rapid access to a broad spectrum of reader and critical reac-
tions to a particular work. The emergence of a multitude of social
media and blogging platforms has also assisted the dissemination of
feminist, LGBTQ and racially conscious critiques of popular fiction
that can now reach a much wider (and more receptive) audience than
would have been the case in the past. Readers and authors whose own
racial, national and gender identities may not previously have been
reflected in ‘mainstream’ popular fiction also now have the potential

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 10  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

ability to reach a much wider audience, although the publishing indus-

try as a whole remains quite conservative.
In recent years, podcasting has also become an increasingly impor-
tant medium for pop fiction storytelling, with the likes of the surreal
serial Welcome to Night Vale (2012–) spawning both a novel and a
live stage show, as well as helping to create an audience for a host of
other genre podcasts in 2015 and 2016. In another sign that popular
fiction (like writing in general) continues to evolve beyond the bound-
aries of the traditional, hard-copy book format, it was reported in
2016 that audio books represent one of the major future growth areas
for the publishing industry. Video games have become an ever more
significant and sophisticated storytelling medium, and many gamers
now argue, with considerable justification, that titles such as Bioshock
(2007), The Last of Us (2013) and Fallout 4 (2015) are just as immer-
sive and imaginative as any novel or film. The pending arrival of a new
generation of virtual reality headsets (such as the Oculus Rift) will
no doubt once again radically reconfigure our ideas of what popular
narrative can and should achieve, and encourage further consideration
of the relationship between the world of print (which now of course
encompasses both traditional hardcopy and e-book format) and other
forms of entertainment.

Before briefly discussing the structure and remit of this volume, it is

important to emphasise the reasons why the academic study of popu-
lar fiction is a worthwhile endeavour. Whilst it will come as no sur-
prise to find a robust defence of the subject area in a book devoted to
the topic, it must be underlined that studying popular fiction certainly
does not indicate a ‘dumbing down’ or dilution of scholarly integrity,
nor does it in any way undermine the high cultural status or value
rightly afforded literary fiction. What it does do is require students
and scholars to think seriously about the ways in which canons are
constructed, to question the mechanisms by which texts are included
or excluded from critical notice, and to consider the ways in which
the world around us – and, just as importantly, our own sense of self
– is informed by the narratives that we consume as readers and then
absorb into our own imaginative and intellectual frameworks. Rather
than reflecting a ‘decline’ in critical standards, the fact that serious
attention is being paid to popular fiction, and to specific popular
genres, is instead indicative of a continued growth in self-confidence
and maturity for the discipline of literary studies.

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 INTRODUCTION  11

As the terms and concepts outlined in the sections that follow

indicate, popular fiction is an attractive and entirely valid subject
of academic study not just because, as critics have often noted, it
provides an invaluable insight into the passions, predilections and
prejudices of the so-called ‘ordinary’ reader, but also because it has
long been understood that, like mass culture more generally, these
texts serve a significant ideological function. As such, they shape the
world and our reactions to it, in ways we are only just beginning fully
to comprehend.
There is much work still to be done. It has taken many years
for popular fiction to make its way onto university reading lists,
and even then it is still only within the past thirty years that major
genres such as horror and the gothic, science fiction, fantasy and the
romance have been academically investigated in any kind of detail or
with any consistency. Indeed, some hugely important genres (most
notably the romance) are very neglected, albeit in that instance with
the exception of a handful of seminal publications. The transforma-
tion in popular reading habits, reception, production and distribution
brought about by the Internet and social media is another area of
urgent academic significance. Fanfiction and fan responses to popular
texts are now increasingly the subject of fascinating and much-needed
critical research, and it is likely that the related boom in self-publish-
ing by both aspiring and established genre authors will soon attract
even more deserved critical attention than has so far been the case.
Furthermore, although there are clear historical reasons for the exist-
ing critical bias towards authors and texts from the UK and North
America, there is also huge scope for popular fiction studies to engage
much more fully with the work of writers who have emerged from
national, racial and cultural contexts that have hitherto been over-
looked or ignored in favour of overwhelmingly white, Anglophone
and Western authors.
Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction is intended to serve
as a reliable and concise starting point, rather than as an exhaustive
or definitive analysis of the entire subject area, and so there are many
considered exclusions and necessarily brief summaries of complex
and much-debated concepts and terms in this volume. The bibliogra-
phies featured here therefore provide numerous suggestions for more
advanced critical reading. The volume consists of five main sections.
The first, and the most substantial, is the A−Z guide, which is intended
to broaden significantly the critical vocabulary of anyone with an

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 12  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

interest in contemporary popular fiction. Particular effort has been

made to ensure that this section is as up-to-date as possible. Many
entries related to recent developments in digital publishing, fanfiction
and new and emerging genres and sub-genres have been included, and
will be updated in future editions. Some of the terms listed here are
in fact being defined in an academic reference work for the first time,
and as such, it should be noted that widely accepted definitions of
terms such as ‘Cli-Fi’, ‘Bizarro Fiction’ and ‘Domestic Noir’ are, at the
time of writing, not yet fixed. I have instead tried to reflect the way in
which these new and emerging terms are most commonly used at the
present time.
The second major section is entitled Key Critical and Theoretical
Approaches to Popular Fiction. Here, nine of the most significant and
emerging theoretical approaches to the study of popular literature
are briefly outlined. This section also serves as an introduction to the
most important theoretical approaches to popular fiction. The roughly
chronological arrangement of the section means that it provides a
broad, summative overview of the evolution of academic and critical
perspectives on popular fiction. The third section introduces six major
popular genres – fantasy, crime, romance, science fiction, horror, the
thriller and one major popular mode – the comic book/graphic novel.
Each entry has a bibliography for those interested in knowing more
about that particular genre. Then there is an annotated listing of fif-
teen of the most significant twenty-first-century popular fiction texts
and, finally, a chronology of key dates which will help readers further
pull together the critical and historical information they have gleaned
from the rest of the volume.
Popular fiction studies is a rapidly evolving subject area, and it is
for this reason that the eight key points listed earlier in this introduc-
tion should be considered as part of an evolving, rather than a fixed,
framework for discussion. For instance, one of the most interesting
developments within literary culture in recent years is what some
commentators, particularly in US literary circles, see as the increas-
ingly blurred lines between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ fiction (it has also
been called the ‘Genrefication’ debate, in response to critic Joshua
Rothman’s use of that term). This fascinating critical conversation
reflects the fact that an award-winning literary novelist can now write
an acclaimed zombie novel (Colson Whitehead’s Zone One [2011]),
or a fantasy novel (Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant [2015]), or a
tale about the aftermath of a devastating pandemic in which a fictional

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 INTRODUCTION  13

graphic novel is of key thematic significance (Station Eleven by Emily

St John Mandel [2014]). At the same time, genre writers such as
Stephen King and Gillian Flynn now regularly receive fulsome reviews
in the books pages, nominations for important literary prizes, and in
King’s case, prestigious medals.
It seems obvious then that the relationship between popular fiction
and literary fiction is undergoing some radical and potentially far-
reaching changes which must be acknowledged in this work (and have
been), even if their full ramifications have yet to become clear. Just
as academic definitions of popular fiction itself can never be entirely
fixed, and have instead always developed in relation to specific his-
torical, commercial and cultural factors, so too is it the case that the
relationship between popular and literary fiction is always in a state
of flux – and all the more so at this present time of huge commercial,
technological and cultural change. It is my hope that the terms and
concepts outlined here will provide not only a useful reference tool for
students, academics and the general reader, but will also help spark
further critical interest in this particularly exciting and worthwhile
area of contemporary literary studies.

Bibliography
Berberich, Christina (ed.) (2015), ‘Introduction: The Popular – Literature
Versus literature’, in The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction,
London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–10.
Bloom, Clive (2008), Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1990, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Dalziel, Margaret (1957), Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago: An Unexplored
Tract of Literary History, London: Cohen and West.
Gelder, Ken (2004), Popular Fiction: The Logistics and Practices of a Literary
Field, London: Routledge.
Glover, David and Scott McCracken (eds) (2012), ‘Introduction,’ in The
Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 1–14.
Hoppenstand, Gary (2016), ‘Genres and Formulas in Popular Literature’, in
G. Burns (ed.), A Companion to Popular Culture, Chichester: John Wiley
and Sons, pp. 101–22.
McCracken, Scott (1998), Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction, Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Neuburg, Victor E. (1977), Popular Literature: A History and Guide, London:
Penguin.
Pittard, Christopher (2015), ‘The Victorian Context: Serialization, Circulation,

MURPHY 9781474411035 PRINT.indd 13 28/11/2016 09:23

 14  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

Genres’, in C. Berberich (ed.), The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular

Fiction, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 11–29.
Williams, Raymond (1983), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society,
New York: Oxford University Press.

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 A−Z of Key Concepts and Terms

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MURPHY 9781474411035 PRINT.indd 16 28/11/2016 09:23
 A
Acafan Term meaning ‘academic fan’ (sometimes rendered as ‘aca-
fan’) which emerged during the 1980s as a means of denoting a
scholar who engages in the study of fandom and self-identifies
as a fan. The term was further popularised by Matt Hills in Fan
Cultures (2002) and Henry Jenkins in his blog ‘Confessions of an
Aca Fan’.
‘Aga Saga’ Term used to describe a form of (usually) female-authored
popular fiction particularly popular in the United Kingdom
during the 1990s. According to Deborah Philips (2006), the sub-
genre can be distinguished from other forms of romance fiction
by its specific focus upon the domestic and romantic travails of
middle-class, middle-aged women. The use of the term ‘Aga Saga’
is derived from the fact that in the UK the Aga stove has long
been considered a marker of a certain type of cosy middle-class
lifestyle. As Philips notes, the typical heroine is an overlooked
middle-aged woman who has subordinated her own dreams to
those of her children and husband (2006: 97).
Airport Novel Phrase used to describe the kind of supposedly unde-
manding genre fiction purchased when one is in transit, and in
need of fast-paced, accessible and escapist reading material. The
‘airport novel’ is therefore a Jet-Age successor to the ‘railway
fiction’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. This
kind of fiction is also seen as being briefly enthralling yet ulti-
mately disposable. To describe a work of fiction as an ‘airport
novel’ is therefore not always intended as flattery. In Language
in Popular Fiction (1990), Walter Nash uses the setting of the
airport lounge as a playful starting point for his consideration of
style and gender in genre fiction.
Alternate History Also known as ‘alternate world’ or ‘counterfac-
tual’ fiction (the latter is the term preferred by historians). As
Karen Hellekson states, the core premise of any alternate history
is the idea that a crucial event did not happen as we know it
did (2001: 2). Many of the best-known alternate history novels
involve imagining different outcomes for the Second World War.
Foremost amongst these is Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High
Castle (1965) and Robert Harris’s 1992 bestseller Fatherland.
Harry Turtledove is probably the leading contemporary exponent
of the sub-genre, but other authors currently writing in this vein
include Jo Walton (in her ‘Small Change’ series [2006–8]) and

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 18  AMAZON.COM

Lavie Tidhar, whose novel The Violent Century (2013) features

an alternate reality in which superheroes help change the course
of the Second World War.
Amazon.com US-based online retailer that has done more than any
other company to transform the publishing, distribution, mar-
keting and reading of popular fiction in the twenty-first century.
Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, the company began operations as
an online book retailer, but now sells products in almost every
conceivable consumer category. Amazon first of all had a massive
impact upon the fortunes of physical bookstores, with the profits
of even large chain stores (such as Borders in the USA) eventu-
ally being massively undercut by the ease and perceived afford-
ability of the company’s vast online bookstore, selling both new
releases and second-hand copies. Although there had been several
previous attempts (most notably by Sony) to create an e-reader
that would have truly mass-market appeal, it was only with the
release of the first-generation Amazon Kindle e-reader in 2007
that the technology really took off with consumers (in large part
thanks to the ease with which titles could be downloaded from
Amazon’s online store). More recently, Amazon has been a major
force in the rise of self-publishing and digital publishing, with
online platforms such as CreateSpace, Kindle Direct and Kindle
New Worlds enabling aspiring authors to upload, format, market
and sell their own fiction. Amazon also owns the influential online
book-review/­recommendation site Goodreads, the audio-book
company Audible.com, and has its own publishing arm, with
branded imprints related to all of the major popular genres, as
well as a variety of other sub-genres and non-fiction categories.
Apocalyptic Fiction Apocalyptic fiction has long-standing history
arguably going back as far as The Book of Revelation, in Western
culture at least. One of the earliest bestsellers in colonial North
America was a lengthy poem entitled The Day of Doom (1662),
and US authors in particular have been exploring the theme with
increasing variety ever since. The major means of bringing about
the apocalypse have remained roughly the same for many cen-
turies: they include the biblical apocalypse (see the Left Behind
series [1995–2007); cosmic catastrophe (as in Karen Thompson
Walker’s The Age of Miracles [2012] and Ben H. Winter’s The
Last Policeman series [2012]); the consequences of technological
arrogance (which would include the many nuclear-related apoca-

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 AUDIO BOOKS  19

lyptic fictions as well as those relying on the ever-more popular

‘artificial intelligence turns against us trope’); plague (a trend
which began with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man [1826] and con-
tinued in the likes of George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides [1949],
Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, and more recently,
Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven); and ecologi-
cal catastrophe (as in Liz Jensen’s The Uninvited [2012]). In the
1950s, Cold War, nuclear and technological anxieties brought
about a boom in such texts on both sides of the Atlantic, such
as Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial (1956) and Nevil Shute’s On
the Beach (1957). The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a
spate of eco-catastrophe narratives, such as J. G. Ballard’s The
Drowned World (1962). The apocalypse is, of course, rarely the
end in any of these texts: there are usually survivors, who try to
rebuild civilisation, or slowly die in the ruins. As Kim Newman
has noted, in reference to apocalyptic cinema, ‘the more com-
plicated a civilisation becomes, the more fun it is to imagine the
whole works going up in flames’ (1999: 18). Fictional representa-
tions of eco-crisis have taken on added urgency of late, as the dev-
astating impact of climate change becomes ever more terrifyingly
apparent (see also Cli-Fi). Thanks to the success of Max Brook’s
World War Z (2006) and the TV adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s
comic series The Walking Dead (2003–) zombie-centric catastro-
phes have also been very popular since the mid-2000s.
Audio Books Books recorded onto tape, CD, or, increasingly, digital
downloads so that a narrative can be listened to rather than
read, and now particularly associated with online companies such
as Audible.com, Skybrite and Scribd. One of the first recorded
novels (released on gramophone, and intended for the blind)
was Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1935).
Now, every major fiction release is rapidly made available in
digitally downloadable audio format. The format has been lent
renewed popularity by the current ubiquity of portable audio
devices. Increasingly, audio books are also being reconfigured
so as to provide a more immersive experience. Some narratives
are even being created for audio only, as is the case with Jeffrey
Deaver’s 2014 thriller The Starling Project, which was produced
as a stand-alone example of ‘audio entertainment’ for Audible.
com. Audio books are a major area of current growth for the
publishing industry.

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 20  THE BECHDEL TEST

B
The Bechdel Test Created by American graphic novelist/memoirist
Alison Bechdel, the ‘Bechdel Test’ has in recent years become
a frequently cited means of drawing attention to the under-­
representation of female characters in popular culture. According
to Bechdel’s original ‘test’ – which took the form of a conversa-
tion in a 1985 issue of her comic Dykes to Watch Out For – there
are three basic requirements that a narrative must fulfil in order
to have ‘passed’. 1. There have to be at least two women in it.
2. They have to talk to each other. 3. They have to talk to each
other about something other than a man. Bechdel has said that
she sees the test as being representative of her own career-long
mission to represent women as subjects rather than objects. The
Bechdel Test has now been succeeded by a number of supple-
mentary ‘tests’ designed to highlight the under-representation of
women and minority groups. These include the self-explanatory
‘Racial Bechdel Test’ and the ‘Vito Russo Test’, which relates to
the representation of LGBTQ characters. Other recent variations
include the ‘Sexy Lamp Test’ (proposed by comics writer Kelly
Sue DeConnick): ‘If you can remove a female character from your
plot and replace her with a sexy lamp and your story still works,
you’re a hack’ and the ‘Mako Mori Test’ (created in response to
the 2013 film Pacific Rim), which relates to the degree of char-
acter and plot development afforded a female character within a
given narrative.
Bestseller John Sutherland has defined the bestseller as ‘commonly
the book that everyone is reading now, or no-one is reading
any more’, thereby emphasising the ephemerality of such titles
and their link to current popular taste (2007: 8). Clive Bloom
anchors the term more directly in the commercial realm, char-
acterising the bestseller as ‘a book that enjoys phenomenal sales
over a very short period of time’, and noting that the term first
entered the popular consciousness during the late nineteenth cen-
tury, when the combination of cheap new printing technologies
and the advent of mass literacy helped fuel the public appetite
for popular fiction to an unprecedented extent (2008:1). These
days, the term is generally understood to denote a book that
achieves considerable commercial success and public prominence
within a clearly defined period after publication (be it a matter of
weeks after initial release or several months). In a subsequently

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 BESTSELLER  21

often cited observation, sociologist Robert Escarpit distinguished

between ‘fast-sellers’ that sell very well but only for a short period
of time, ‘steady sellers’, which sell at a much more measured pace,
but ultimately rack up very impressive sales numbers, and the
‘bestseller’, which combines the most lucrative qualities of both
(1966: 118). The history of popular fiction is littered with poign-
ant references to once immensely successful authors whose oeuvre
has been forgotten by all but the most thorough scholars or avid
genre enthusiasts. To be the author of a bestseller is no guarantee
whatsoever of enduring literary fame.
As Ken Gelder observes, although many bestsellers can be clas-
sified as works of popular fiction, not all popular fiction titles will
become bestsellers (2004: 3). More recently, John Helgarson, Sara
Karrholm and Ann Steiner, the editors of Hype: Bestsellers and
Literary Culture (2016) note that many bestsellers are acknowl-
edged ‘classics’, i.e. works of ‘literary’ fiction. So it is important
to remember that as several earlier critics have acknowledged,
the ‘bestseller’ and the work of ‘popular’ fiction are by no means
necessarily the same thing.
The modern conception of the bestseller is closely related to
the establishment of newspaper bestseller lists, the most famous
of which was started by The New York Times in 1931. Though it
began as a listing compiled from the sales records of local book-
sellers, it quickly evolved into a nation-wide ranking system based
on reports filed from all over the country, relying on data culled
from book chains, independent retailers and wholesalers. Since
1984, the NYT list has been divided into fiction and non-­fiction.
The most significant recent change was the 2011 decision to incor-
porate data related to e-book sales. The paper also now has spe-
cific lists for children’s fiction, non-fiction and graphic novels.
The concept of an official bestseller list was slower to take off in
the UK, but since 1974, The Sunday Times has featured one, again
compiled from weekly sales reports. Whilst some bestsellers do
arise seemingly out of nowhere (here, the massive sales recorded
by Fifty Shades of Grey [2011] even before it was snapped up
by a major publisher comes to mind), many books of this nature
have been granted a massive marketing push from their publish-
ers, and novels written by certain authors are guaranteed a place
on the list right away, due to their brand-name recognition and
pre-release sales orders. The power of the ‘official’ best-seller list

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 22  BIOFICTION

has always lain in its ability to perpetuate a feedback loop of

higher visibility for the books featured there, first in bookstores
(bestsellers and new releases that are expected to be bestsellers are
usually prominently shelved) and now, increasingly, online.
Biofiction Term that refers to narratives that combine biographical
elements taken from the life of a real-life figure (often a creative
individual, such as a novelist, artist, or sculptor) with fictionalised
components: see for instance two recent novels about specific epi-
sodes in the life of Henry James (The Master by Colm Tóibín and
Author, Author by David Lodge, both 2004). John Sutherland
also applies the term to popular narratives, as when he notes that
Harold Robbins’s The Carpet Baggers (1961) is a thinly disguised
take on the life of Howard Hughes (2007: 68).
The Birmingham School Collective term for scholars and academics
associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
the University of Birmingham, established by Richard Hoggart in
1964. Hoggart, author of the influential 1957 monograph The
Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life (one of the first
major works of British cultural studies) also served as the centre’s
first director. Other important thinkers associated with the centre
included Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel and
E. P. Thompson. As Daniel Horowitz observes, the centre ‘came
to exercise a commanding role in the field of Cultural Studies,
shaping analysis of popular culture not only in Britain but also in
the United States’ (2012: 235).
Bizarro Fiction Bizarro fiction is characterised by its surreal, absurd-
ist, grotesque and often comical stylistic and tonal excess. The
sub-genre (an off-shoot of weird fiction/fantasy) has its origins
in the output of a number of small presses specialising in cult fic-
tion, amongst them Eraserhead Press, Raw Dog Screaming Press
and Afterbirth Books. Bizarro fiction thrives on pushing plots
and themes to their most absurdist and outlandishly grotesque
conclusions, and many of the titles are notable for their deliber-
ately eye-catching ridiculousness. These include Help! A Bear is
Eating Me (2008) by Mykle Hansen; Dungeons and Drag Queens
(2014) by M. P. Johnson; and the prolific Carlton Mellick’s III’s
Menstruating Mall (2011), The Morbidly Obese Ninja (2011)
and As She Stabbed Me Gently in the Face (2015). There are now
websites devoted to Bizarro Fiction (such as bizarrocentral.com),
short story collections, fan events and magazines.

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 BONNET-RIPPER  23

Blockbuster The term ‘blockbuster’ was initially applied to cinema:

the release of Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) is often cited as
marking the beginning of the blockbuster era. Within a literary
context it refers to a work of popular fiction that has achieved an
extremely high public profile and massive sales. As with block-
buster cinema, there is also an assumption that these titles are for-
mulaic, fast-paced crowd-pleasers. Popular fiction blockbusters
often feature attention-grabbing or taboo plot elements (i.e. sex
and/or violence). The scandalous bestseller Peyton Place (Grace
Metalious, 1956) and Jacqueline Susann’s lurid 1966 melodrama
Valley of the Dolls are often described as prototypical ‘block-
busters’. Evan Brier notes that the term itself is ‘an ambiguous
product of the post-war emergence of mass culture’ (2010: 114),
whilst in 1981 Thomas Whiteside saw it as an indication of
the then increasing trend amongst publishers to ‘become focused
on the pursuit of “the big book” – the so-called blockbuster’ –
in other words, a title that has deliberately been formulated to
appeal to the widest audience possible, and has been supported
by aggressive marketing and a well-promoted release date, as
well as a barrage of related publicity (1981: 21–2). Citing the
work of authors such as Arthur Hailey and Colleen McCullough,
Scott McCracken has described the blockbuster as ‘the defining
popular genre of the 1980s’ (2004: 620).
Bodice-Ripper A kind of romance novel, generally with a historical
setting and explicit sexual content, so called because the covers
often feature submissive young women lying in the grasp of a
strapping (and frequently shirtless) suitor, whose ardour is so
intense that he is literally ripping off her dress. The sub-genre,
which was particularly prominent during the 1970s and 1980s,
usually features a virginal heroine whose initial objections towards
a handsome, charismatic but domineering older man are over-
come by his animal magnetism and physical power. As such, they
have often been accused in recent years of functioning as implicit
or explicit rape fantasies (see Zidle 1999: 25). Sweet Savage Love
(1974) by Rosemary Rogers is often held up as a prime example.
More recently, it has frequently been suggested that E. L. James’s
Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) is essentially a contemporary take on
the conventions of the traditional ‘Bodice-Ripper’.
Bonnet-Ripper Romance sub-genre currently popular in the USA,
particularly amongst Evangelical Christian readers. Many of the

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 24  BOOK CLUBS

authors come from an Evangelical background themselves. The

bonnet-ripper usually features a female protagonist who comes
from an Amish or Mennonite background. The Shunning (1997)
by Beverley Lewis is often cited as the first major example of the
trend. During the course of these novels the protagonist usually
embarks upon a forbidden but chaste romance with an ‘outsider’
that brings about a spiritual crisis. As Valerie Weaver-Zercher
notes, this publishing category has become ever more popular in
recent years, moving out from the Christian bookstores initially
associated with the trend and into mainstream chains such as
Barnes and Noble (2013: 7).
Book Clubs The most common current meaning of the term refers
to an informal group comprised of friends or acquaintances that
meets regularly in order to discuss a book selected as their subject
of discussion. These kinds of gatherings have a long and distin-
guished history, and individual book clubs can focus on specific
genres, non-fiction topics, current bestsellers or any other kind of
volume. In recent years, the idea of the book club has experienced
a major boom fuelled by the success of two high-profile television
versions of the idea. These are: the ‘Oprah’s Book Club’ segment
of The Oprah Winfrey Show, which ran from 1996 to 2002 and,
in the UK, ‘The Richard & Judy Book Club’, which ran on the
Richard & Judy TV show between 2004 and 2009. Both clubs
were regular segments on daytime television shows with largely
female audiences.
Books selected for Winfrey’s book club could automatically
expect a huge boost in sales and public profile. Although many
of the titles chosen were relatively recent publications (or new
releases), even classic literary texts selected for the show became
instant bestsellers. Ease of purchase was facilitated by promi-
nent displays in many bookshops, and the fact that the books
selected featured stickers emblazoned with the words ‘Oprah’s
Book Club’. Not everyone was a fan: in 2002 Jonathan Franzen
famously objected to the selection of his novel The Corrections
(2001) on the grounds that he disagreed with the commodifi-
cation of literary fiction he associated with the initiative. ‘The
Richard & Judy Book Club’ imitated many of Winfrey’s innova-
tions and rapidly became very influential within the UK pub-
lishing industry. They tended to feature more genre titles than
Winfrey, alternating them with literary fiction and non-fiction.

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 THE BOOKER PRIZE  25

Though the show has now ended, the club still continues as a
website operated in partnership with book retailer W. H. Smith.
The renewed popularity of the book club concept has led to
a trend for special ‘Book Club’ editions of popular titles which
feature ‘bonus material’ designed to foster group discussion.
Book clubs are thriving in any number of places on the Internet.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s resolution to read more
books in 2015 led to the establishment of a ‘Year of Books’
Facebook discussion page which soon garnered more than
500,000 ‘likes’. Book clubs devoted to any and all genres, authors
and topics can be found on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and
Goodreads.
The term ‘Book Club’ can also be used to refer to the long-
standing practice by which subscriber-based commercial compa-
nies send pre-selected books to their customers on a regular basis.
Some of the most famous include ‘The Book-of-the-Month-Club’,
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (now rebranded as ‘Reader’s
Digest Select Editions’) and the Library of America (which
publishes beautifully designed hard-back editions of canonical
American authors, although increasingly, genre authors have also
featured).
Book Packaging The modern book-packaging industry emerged at
the beginning of the twentieth century, when Edward Stratemeyer
of the Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate began to ‘market series
(and book) concepts to publishers, then hire others to write sto-
ries to order, using specific titles, plot outlines and pseudonyms’
(Johnson 2011: 308). Book packaging firms today also create
series concepts and plot-outlines in-house and then commission
writers to work according to the agreed outline, with the com-
pany retaining the legal rights and intellectual copyright to the
resulting novel and the author receiving an agreed fee (often a
small percentage of what the book will make in sales). The book-­
packaging industry in the US is dominated by Alloy Entertainment,
which specialises in producing series for the young adult market.
Their properties include The Vampire Diaries, The 100 series and
the Gossip Girls series. Other prominent book-packaging firms
include James Frey’s Full Fathom Five and Paper Lantern Lit,
established by YA author Lauren Oliver.
The Booker Prize The Man Booker Prize (formerly The Booker Prize,
and originally the Booker-McConnell Prize) was established in

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 26  BOOKWATCH

1969 in order to recognise the best novel of the year written in

English and published in the United Kingdom. It is now one of
the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, and is awarded
only to what the judges consider to be ‘quality fiction’. A work
of genre fiction has yet to be considered for the Booker, although
the 2011 short-list was accused by some critics of being ‘too read-
able’, and in recent years, historically-based literary fiction by the
likes of Peter Carey (The True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001
winner), Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall, 2009 winner and Bring up
The Bodies, 2012 winner) and Eleanor Catton (The Luminaries,
2013 winner) has often proved successful.
Bookwatch British company founded in 1982 in order to compile
sales figures from bookshops and wholesalers so that they could
be aggregated for The Sunday Times bestseller list.
Brand-Name Author A so-called ‘brand-name author’ is one whose
work has become so well known and commercially successful that
simply having their name on the cover of a new release is consid-
ered a powerful marketing tool. Indeed, on the covers of novels
by brand-name authors, the author’s name often appears in a
larger font than the actual title. As John B. Thompson observes,
if an author becomes a ‘Brand Name’ it is an indication that they
have accumulated a substantial symbolic capital of their own,
and can become more and more dependent on their own brand
as opposed to that assigned to them by the publisher (2010:
215). Brand-name authors are almost always associated with one
specific genre (even if, like horror author Stephen King or fantasy
author J. K. Rowling, they also write in others), and as such, the
purchaser of one of their novels can reasonably anticipate that
buying it guarantees a particular kind of reading experience. Being
alive is not a prerequisite for continued commercial success if one
is a brand-name author, as the extensive publishing afterlives of
J. R. R. Tolkien, Agatha Christie and Virginia Andrews (whose
name continued to appear on ghost-writer penned novels for dec-
ades after her death) testify. Certain series also take on a brand-
name status that transcends the lifespan of the original author,
such as the James Bond series, the Sherlock Holmes stories and,
more recently, Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series,
which was continued by another writer after his death in 2004.

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 CELEBRITY AUTHOR  27

C
Canon The literary canon as it is traditionally conceived of is a list of
set texts said to constitute, as Harold Bloom famously put it, the
most ‘authoritative in our culture’ (1994: 1), although it is also a
malleable and ever-evolving concept. The formation of a canon
always has an ideological component, in that singling out any one
text for particular critical notice always involves reflecting upon
its perceived cultural, historical and social importance (or lack
thereof, if it is excluded). As Trevor Ross notes, ‘Today, canon-
formation is almost exclusively associated with the mechanisms
of cultural reproduction, and in particular with the establishment
of university curriculum and syllabi’ (1998: 10). Works classified
as popular fiction have, in previous eras, almost always been
excluded from the literary canon.
Category Fiction Term used (particularly within US publishing) to
refer to genre fiction. Sometimes used in opposition to the term
‘general fiction’, which refers to titles that do not appear to fit
into any one genre or genres. As a result general fiction is often
used as a synonym for ‘literary fiction’.
Celebrity Author Memoirs, novels and ‘inspirational’ or ‘self-help’
titles purportedly penned by celebrities have achieved particu-
lar prominence in recent years, with UK publishers in particu-
lar releasing a spate of such titles in the weeks leading up to
Christmas holidays, in the assumption that they will be purchased
as presents on the basis of name recognition alone. To be a celeb-
rity author (as opposed to an author who has become a celebrity),
one must have first achieved a degree of fame in an endeavour
unrelated to writing (such as acting, comedy, music, or reality
television). Although some celebrity authors do actually write
fiction themselves, many of the novels released by celebrities are
largely (if not entirely) written by professional ghost-writers, and,
like supermodel Naomi Campbell’s much-derided 1994 effort
Swan, tend to feature plots which riff on some aspect of the
celebrities’ own persona. The British glamour model and reality
TV star Katie Price has been particularly prolific in this regard.
Memoirs penned by female comedians or comic actors have been
big sellers in the US of late. Celebrity authors are also increas-
ingly drawn from the online world. Beauty vlogger Zoe Sugg (aka
Youtube star Zoella) released the novel Girl Online in 2014 and
soon became the UK’s quickest selling debut novelist.

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 28  CHICK-LIT

Chick-Lit Term used to describe a sub-genre of romance fiction par-

ticularly popular during the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Chick-
Lit generally focuses upon the loves and often humorous travails
of urban professional women aged in their late twenties or early
thirties. The watershed moment for the sub-genre is considered
to be the publication of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones Diary in
1996. The comic novel, which started life as a newspaper column
in The Independent, had a distinctively self-deprecating heroine
who, like many of her fictional successors, was on the one hand
seemingly reaping the benefits of Second-Wave feminism’s bat-
tles, yet has also found herself seized by the longing for a very
traditional version of ‘true love’. The typical Chick-Lit heroine
works in an industry considered glamorous and exciting (PR,
journalism, the fashion industry and show business all feature
frequently. Sadly, academia does not). However, her impressive
professional accomplishments are undercut by comic set-pieces
and frequent social faux pas. Critical debates surrounding the
sub-genre tend to revolve around the question of whether these
novels represent an empowering take on popular post-feminist
attitudes, or whether their frequent structural reliance upon con-
ventional romantic resolution undermines any claim that these
titles might have to be truly feminist.
Chick Noir Term used to describe the kinds of (usually) female-written
psychological thrillers that have also been described as ‘domestic
noir’ and ‘grip lit’, in which suspense arises from the treachery
of familial and marital relationships, and the main character is
almost always female.
Choose-Your-Own Adventure Choose-your-own-adventure series,
usually targeted at children and younger teenagers, were par-
ticularly popular during the 1980s and 1990s. In these novels,
the reader must make the choices that determine the outcome
and development of the story. They could be considered an early
and influential form of interactive fiction. In the USA, the R. A.
Montgomery-authored Bantam Books series ‘Choose Your Own
Adventure’ epitomised the format. It featured quest-driven nar-
ratives often belonging to the fantasy, mystery, or science fic-
tion genres. In the UK, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s The
Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982) launched the ‘Fighting
Fantasy’ role-playing games series for Puffin, and resulted in
many sequels, as well as role-playing board games and video

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 CLASS  29

games titles. Livingstone and Jackson also helped found the

Games Workshop company, which spawned the Warhammer
series of miniature war-games, as well as the ‘Black Library’
imprint, which publishes fiction set in the Warhammer universe.
Christian Fiction Christian fiction is defined by John Mort as fiction
that focuses upon a conflict related to Christian principles (2002:
1). It is currently dominated in the US by fiction written by and
for an Evangelical audience. Historical novels with a Biblical
setting were very popular in the late-nineteenth and early-twen-
tieth centuries. These included Ben-Hur: A Novel of the Christ,
by Lew Wallace (1880); and The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas
(1942). Nowadays, Christian fiction can encompass any number
of popular genres, but the most common include romance, inspi-
rational fiction, historical fiction and supernatural horror. The
most high-profile Christian fiction of recent decades has been
the Left Behind series (1995–2007), written by Tim LaHaye and
Jerry B. Jenkins, which now encompasses sixteen novels and has
to date spawned two critically derided film adaptations, includ-
ing a particularly poor 2015 version which provided further
evidence of the sad decline of Nicolas Cage’s once impressive
acting career/hairline. Left Behind and its sequels dramatise the
‘Tribulation’ – the period following the ‘Rapture’ during which
a disparate group of men and women ‘left behind’ on earth must
battle to defeat the Antichrist (who is here, impressively, both the
Secretary General of the United Nations and People magazine’s
‘Sexiest Man Alive’). The fast-paced, action-packed series helped
establish Christian fiction as a mainstream publishing category
in the US. Whilst the Left Behind series adhered to the tenets
of the Dispensationalist branch of fundamentalist Christianity,
other Christian fiction titles cater to the interests of readers from
a broad range of denominations, sects and interest groups.
Class When considering popular fiction from a critical and histori-
cal perspective, social class – and in particular, the class of the
assumed reader – has always been significant. From the earliest
attempts to discuss popular fiction as a specific literary category, it
has often been confidently asserted that a taste for such narratives
is overwhelmingly associated with ‘lower-class’, ‘working-class’,
or ‘common’ origins, despite the fact that, as Scott McCracken
rightly observes, ‘the social groups that make up the audience for
popular fiction are diverse and overlapping’ (1998: 5).

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 30  CLASS

In 1957, Margaret Dalziel, like many critics to follow in her

footsteps, rightly linked the rise of popular fiction to the mid-
nineteenth-century advent of cheap periodicals (such as penny
dreadfuls) that reflected the tastes of an increasingly literate mass
audience. Writing in 1977, Victor E. Neuburg described popu-
lar literature as ‘what the unsophisticated reader has chosen for
pleasure’ and adds that while such a reader may come from any
class, the primary appeal of popular fiction reading has been to
the poor and to children (two groups often placed together by
the arbiters of public taste) (1977: 12). It’s a perspective also
found in many of the earliest attempts to grapple with what we
would now call ‘popular culture’. Matthew Arnold’s essays in
Culture and Anarchy (1869) were in part inspired by concern
regarding the supposedly disruptive nature of working-class enter-
tainments, and by the belief that ‘culture’ had the potential to be
an immensely important and positive influence upon the middle
classes. F. R. Leavis argued in his 1930 essay on ‘Mass Civilisation
and Minority Culture’ that only an educated and increasingly
embattled elite could truly appreciate (and evaluate) art and litera-
ture, as did Q. D. Leavis in Fiction and the Reading Public (1932).
In what became an often replicated assumption, industrialisa-
tion and mass production were seen to have eroded the bound-
aries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and created a kind of
‘levelling down’ effect, rendering the ‘average’ (which is often
a synonym for ‘working-class’ or ‘lower-middle-class’) reader
a much less ‘cultivated’ individual than they had been in the
past. For Frankfurt School thinkers Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer ‘mass culture’ was a commercially codified means
of pacifying and controlling the working classes, a form of ‘anti-
Enlightenment’ that fettered consciousness and even had the
potential to actively impede true democracy.
Indeed, the question of to what extent popular culture serves
to help maintain the political and economic status quo, or has
the potential to act as a liberating and even subversive impetus
for change has long been a key preoccupation of critics con-
cerned with class relationships in particular. Cultural studies in
the UK (which significantly shaped the academic study of popu-
lar fiction as it exists today) essentially began with explorations
of working-class popular culture by scholars such as Richard
Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and

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 COMIC FANTASY  31

Paddy Whannel. Critics have also long been concerned about the
effect that popular culture has upon the middle classes, and there
exists a multitude of terms to describe the assumed middle-class
reader and the material that is said to be targeted at them. Along
with ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, ‘middlebrow’ emerged in the
1920s as a shorthand for a form of popular culture that occupied
a half-way point between ‘high’ culture and ‘low’ or ‘mass’ cul-
ture. In 1960 American critic Dwight Macdonald coined the term
‘midcult’ in order to describe works of art that paid lip service to
the standards of high culture but in fact corrupted them. French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu analysed the way in which cultural
taste proved to be a vital component of middle-class, ‘bourgeois’
identity in his landmark study Distinction (1977). More recently,
critics of popular fiction have tended to move away somewhat
from purely class-based discussions of popular narratives, in part
because it is taken as a given that such texts attract readers from
a broad social spectrum, and always have. This is certainly not
to say, however, that we should downplay the obvious historical
relationship between urban working-class culture in the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries and the emergence of popular
genres in the first place, or ever discount the significance of social
class entirely.
Cli-Fi Portmanteau term derived from the phrase ‘Climate Change
Fiction’ usually said to have been coined by blogger and journal-
ist Dan Bloom in 2007. Bloom used the term to describe novels
that he considered to be ‘Climate Fiction’: i.e. a sub-genre of
science fiction that takes as its major theme the immediate effects
and wider ramifications of global warming. Bloom states that he
intended the term to serve as a ‘wake-up call’ in order to under-
line the immediacy and urgency of the crisis. It wasn’t until the
term began to be used by major media outlets during 2012/13 to
describe a new wave of fiction concerned with this subject matter
that ‘Cli-Fi’ became widely used. There have even been sugges-
tions that it represents a new genre in its own right. However, this
claim has angered some science fiction critics, who rightly point
out that the genre already has a long-standing history of produc-
ing novels focused on the devastating impact of climate change.
Comics see entry in Major Popular Genres section
Comic Fantasy Sub-genre of fantasy notable for the foregrounding of
humour, whether in the form of knowing parodies or ­subversion

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 32  COMIC STRIP

of genre tropes, clichés and plot conventions. Epic, or ‘high’

fantasy, perhaps in part due to the sub-genre’s occasional ten-
dency towards pomposity, is a particularly common target, as
with the likes of Piers Anthony’s Xanth series (1977–) and Diana
Wynne Jones’s witty non-fiction ‘guidebook’ The Tough Guide
to Fantasyland (1996) testify. Comic fantasy is also characterised
by frequent comic set-pieces, puns and other word play, and a
wry sense of genre self-awareness. Sometimes comic fantasy can
take the form of novel-length parodies of specific series, as in the
self-explanatory Bored of the Rings (1966), and sometimes the
comic elements are woven into an elaborate fantasy world of that
author’s own creation, such as in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
series (1983–2015), which with every instalment became ever more
elaborate and intellectually ambitious. Urban fantasy novels often
feature protagonists with a self-deprecating sense of humour, but
tend not to rely on the comedic set-pieces, word play, or the kind
of metafictional self-awareness that characterises comic fantasy.
Comic Strip Comic strips were a common feature of newspapers
from the late nineteenth century up until the present day, but
were particularly significant during the 1930s, when they con-
tributed to the emergence of the comic book. Early comic strips
to hit the big time included The Katzenjammer Kids (1897−),
Little Orphan Annie (1924−2010), Dick Tracy (1931–), Rupert
the Bear (1920–) and Flash Gordon (1934–). In the 1960s and
after well-known titles included Peanuts (1950–2000), Garfield
(1978–), Doonesbury (1970–) and Calvin and Hobbes (1985–
1995). Comic strips were usually published in black and white
during the week, with a larger-sized colour supplement at week-
ends. Although they have now been dropped by many daily
newspapers (the money to be garnered from national syndication
has been hard hit by the closure of many newspapers), comic
strips are currently thriving online. Some of the most notable
web-based titles include Hark! A Vagrant (which often parodies
classic literary texts), Penny Arcade, XKCD, Piled Higher and
Deeper (an uncannily accurate take on the unfortunate lot of the
PhD student), The Perry Bible Fellowship and the surprisingly
melancholy Garfield Minus Garfield, which reprints original
Jim Davis strips with the eponymous feline erased entirely, ‘in
order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr John
Arbuckle’.

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 CREEPYPASTA  33

Covers When it comes to popular fiction, you can usually judge a

book by its cover. Novels conforming to specific genre conven-
tions almost always have covers that aid the reader in quickly
selecting a title that suits their own particular reading interests:
many books will even list the genre to which they belong on
the spine or the back cover so as to further facilitate immediate
identification by potential readers and categorisation by book-
sellers. Chick-lit novels often have covers with pink colouring,
pictures of shoes, women’s legs and shopping bags; epic fantasy
titles feature a preponderance of dour-looking, sword-wielding
men and women in hooded cloaks; military science-fiction titles
usually have a uniformed protagonist wielding a weapon amidst
the backdrop of a field of stars; and the success of Fifty Shades
of Grey (2011) prompted the publication of numerous works of
erotic fiction with copycat monochrome covers. The aim is to
physically resemble a title that has already achieved proven com-
mercial success, so as to hopefully encourage the would-be reader
to purchase more of the same.
The current popularity of e-readers and tablets poses an inter-
esting challenge for publishers in that such titles obviously do
not have covers in the traditional sense of the word, prompting
a 2012 article in The Atlantic to ask, ‘Has Kindle Killed the
Book Cover?’ Online stores such as Amazon reduce the cover art
to thumbnail size and e-book covers certainly do not have the
same importance that they do for hard-copy versions of the text,
which must attract attention in a physical rather than an online
marketplace. Earlier versions of the Kindle also rendered images
in black, white and grey only, and many e-books don’t have a
cover at all once downloaded. However, even when appended
to e-books, it is still said to be the case that covers increase sales
substantially. Many of the self-published authors making their
work available as digital downloads do not have the support of
professional artists and designers. As a result, there are now sev-
eral websites devoted to unintentionally hilarious e-book covers
created by amateur designers, including the oddly mesmerising
Tumblr page ‘Kindle Cover Disasters’.
Creepypasta The term originally derives from ‘copypasta’ (which
referred to an excerpt of text copied and pasted from elsewhere on
the Internet), and is now widely used to refer to horror, supernatu-
ral and paranormal-themed stories, photoshopped images, videos

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 34  CTHULHU MYTHOS

and audio files that originate on online user-generated forums

such as Creepypasta.com. Creepypasta stories are often (but not
always) told in a first-person confessional format designed to
heighten immediacy and impact. They also often have a dramatic
last-minute twist that underlines the format’s debt to the oral
urban legend tradition. As the FAQ section on Creepypasta.com
(currently the most prominent site of this nature) makes clear,
there are some selective criteria for publication, including a incli-
nation towards stories that conform to the moderator’s definition
of ‘creepy’; and a preference for narratives which involve the
creation of an unsettling atmosphere rather than those elements it
characterises as ‘legitimately disturbing’ (i.e. depictions of graphic
physical or sexual violence). Stories are afforded prominence on
the site according to how many readers ‘up vote’ or ‘down vote’
them. Readers can also leave comments and plot suggestions for
the author and other users to read. Creepypasta.com was afflicted
with brief tabloid notoriety in 2014 when it was linked to an
attempted murder allegedly inspired by the controversial ‘Slender
Man’ meme which actually originated in 2009 on another forum
altogether, but was embraced by users of Creepypasta.com,
who wrote countless stories inspired by the original concept and
helped create an elaborate shared mythology.
Cthulhu Mythos Term coined by writer August Derleth that refers
to the organising principle behind American horror/weird fic-
tion author H. P. Lovecraft’s best known stories. In tales such
as ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928), Lovecraft created an elaborate
and remarkably bleak pseudo-mythology revolving around the
idea that humankind exists in a vast and essentially hostile uni-
verse populated by immensely powerful and unfriendly extra-
terrestrial entities. Lovecraft’s work was popular with a number
of other weird fiction authors during the 1930s and 1940s, some
of whom began to integrate references to it into their own work,
and it wasn’t long before the ‘Lovecraftian’ tale became a distinct
form of weird fiction in its own right. Echoes of the ‘cosmic
horror’ and existential angst found in the mythos can be detected
in the likes of the crowd-sourced backstory to the ‘Slender Man’
meme, and the first season of the television series True Detective
(2014).
Cultural Capital Term used by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to
describe the social and economic benefits that are extended to

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 CULTURE INDUSTRY  35

the individual who attains a certain degree of cultural knowledge

and competency within capitalist society. Cultural capital can be
transmitted through the family, through education, and by means
of one’s wider social and institutional education. The concept is
important to us here because in essence it suggests that our social
class, educational background and material circumstances equip
us with the tools which allow us to fully engage (or not) with a
particular cultural artefact. As Bourdieu himself put it ‘a work of
art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the
cultural competence, that is the code, into which it is encoded’
(1999: 2).
Cult Fiction The term refers to fiction which has a niche but devoted
following of readers who fiercely identify with the text. Thomas
R. Whissen suggests it is ‘a reader-created genre which depends
on the reader having a very personal response to the text in
question’ (1992: xiii). The protagonists of cult texts will often be
rebellious outsiders with an anti-establishment ethos. ‘Cult’ pop-
ular fiction tends to arise most consistently from within particular
genres and sub-genres, most frequently science fiction, horror and
fantasy (in particular, ‘weird fiction’). However, Ana Sobral also
argues that, ‘Cults essentially reflect the tastes and opinions of a
particular community of readers’, and a ‘cult’ text can have either
‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’ qualities (2012: 56).
Culture Industry Term formulated by Frankfurt School crit-
ics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their essay ‘The
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, published
in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944: published in revised form in
1947). They initially used the term ‘mass culture’, but removed it
from later drafts because they wanted to exclude from the outset
the suggestion it was a form of popular culture arising spontane-
ously from the people themselves, rather than something that was
deliberately imposed from above by vested capitalistic interests
(Adorno 2010: 98). The term refers to the manufacture of mass-
produced, formulaic and pre-patterned cultural products (they
were specifically referring to films, radio shows and magazines)
which forever promise more than they can deliver, and are cre-
ated in response to an entirely manufactured need. These products
are said to frustrate genuine emotional catharsis in order to help
subordinate the individual consumer’s desires to the capitalist,
profit-driven motives of the supplier. Adorno and Horkheimer

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 36  CULTURAL MATERIALISM

argued that culture as it currently existed was characterised by

a dismaying homogeneity because ‘Films and radio no longer
need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are noth-
ing but business is made into an ideology to legitimize the trash
they intentionally produce’ (2002: 95). In his 1963 essay ‘Culture
Industry Reconsidered’, Adorno further argued that the ‘Culture
Industry’ ‘transfers the profit motive naked on to cultural forms’
(2010: 99), and forces together high and low culture, thereby
snuffing out any potential for resistance within lower art in order
to maintain social control (2010: 98). Adorno makes it clear here
he did not intend their use of the word ‘industry’ to be taken liter-
ally; rather, the phrase refers to ‘the standardisation of the thing
itself – such as that of the Western, familiar to every movie-goer
– and to the rationalisation of distribution techniques, but not
strictly to the production process’ (2010: 100).
Cultural Materialism Term associated in a Cultural Studies context
with Raymond Williams, who defined it as ‘a theory of the specif-
ics of material culture and literary culture within historical mate-
rialism’ (1977: 5). Cultural materialists read a work of popular
fiction from a critical perspective that emphasises the importance
of the historical, social, racial, gender and economic contexts of
the text (though not necessarily all at the same time).
Cultural Studies In the UK, Cultural Studies as an area of academic
inquiry was first established at the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964 (also
known as ‘The Birmingham School’). It is a fluid and interdisci-
plinary academic field drawing upon concepts and methodologi-
cal approaches related to anthropology, sociology, psychology,
politics, film studies and literary studies (Hartley 2003: 8). As
John Storey notes, Raymond Williams’s post-Marxist social
definition of ‘culture’ broadens out the definition of the word
beyond ‘elite’ texts and practices to encompass a much wider
range of practices and events, and makes the study of culture and
power, as well as the meanings and values implicit in ‘a particu-
lar way of life’ a central concern of his colleagues and successors
(2009: 86).
Culture Wars Term which came to prominence in the US during the
1990s and which refers to a perceived conflict between liberal (i.e.
socially progressive and left wing) values and conservative (right
wing and socially ‘traditionalist’) values played out in the venue

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 DIESELPUNK  37

of culture. It was popularised by James Hunter (1992), who sug-

gested that US society can be divided into two camps; ‘the ortho-
dox’ and ‘the progressive’, each with notably different ways of
perceiving the world, which results in clashes that play out in
the media, law, politics and mass entertainment, and which par-
ticularly attach themselves to issues such as the abortion rights,
gay marriage and affirmative action debates. The so-called ‘sad
puppies’ controversy surrounding what many considered to be a
rigged ballot for the 2015 Hugo Awards (one of the most prestig-
ious in science fiction) has been characterised as one of the most
high-profile recent skirmishes of the on-going ‘war’ in a popular
fiction context.
Cyberpunk Science Fiction sub-genre that reflects the growing sig-
nificance of computer networks and the transformative poten-
tial of information technology. The 1984 publication of William
Gibson’s Neuromancer is usually cited as a key moment for the
sub-genre, but the writers such as Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan,
Rudy Rucker and, more recently, Neal Stephenson are also con-
sidered pivotal figures. Cyberpunk often features texts set in a
near future dominated by powerful corporations, and frequently
focuses upon the relationship between humanity and technology,
as well as altered physical and mental states. In recent years, it
has also become a frequent vehicle for the dramatisation of issues
related to post-humanism and trans-humanism.

D
Dad-Lit Male-authored popular fiction narratives popular in the
UK during the late 1990s and early 2000s which focused upon
the emotional, romantic and domestic lives of fathers (or father
figures, in the case of Nick Hornby’s 1998 bestseller About a
Boy), who are usually recently divorced, separated or widowed.
The sub-genre is also associated with Tony Parsons and Mike
Gayle. In the US, the term has of late been used to refer to self-­
deprecating non-fiction memoirs written by new fathers.
Derivative Work Term originating in copyright law which is of par-
ticular relevance to fanfiction. It refers to any creative work that
is derived either partially or entirely from a pre-existing work.
Dieselpunk Emerging offshoot of steampunk which features deliber-
ately anachronistic narratives set in an alternative version of the
years between the end of the First World War and the beginnings

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 38  DIME NOVELS

of the ‘atomic age’ (the 1950s), with a focus on technology, weap-

ons and visual aesthetics/costuming particularly associated with
the rise of fascism, film noir and the inter-war period.
Dime Novels Sensationalist, cheaply produced and cheaply sold
paperback novels particularly popular in the US during the period
between the Civil War and the early twentieth century. Dime
novels represent a precursor to the mass-market paperback genre
fiction market. Their original price (ten cents) explains the name.
As Edward T. le Blanc notes, whilst the earliest dime novels
tended to feature distinctively American subjects – Westerns,
biographies, historical fiction – a range of other genres soon
became very popular, in particular adventure stories, romance
and adventure tales (1996: 13).
Disaster Fiction Form of popular fiction that takes as its plot impetus
some sort of devastating catastrophe, be it natural (earthquakes,
volcanoes, storms), man made (climate change, devastating
technological meltdown), ecological, or cosmic (meteor strikes,
comets and the like). The disaster which serves as the focus of
such a text may not be apocalyptic in nature (although it often
is). Karsten Wind Meyhoff suggests that disaster fiction’s typical
setting is a large city, allowing for scenes of chaos in the street,
and focuses on the choice facing an individual or a group of
people who have survived the initial devastation in a time of great
crisis, and always shows the before and after, with an emphasis
on scenes of simulated destruction and mass death (2012: 304).
Disintermediation Term that refers to the reduction of importance
now granted to the traditional gatekeepers between the consumer
and the product that he or she wishes to buy (in this case, a work
of popular fiction). Until relatively recently, if one wanted to
purchase a novel, it was necessary to actually go to a bookshop,
select the book and pay for it in person. Now, anyone with inter-
net access can purchase a book in seconds, be it a hard copy for
shipping or an e-book instantly downloaded to an e-reader, tablet
or other mobile device. The current tendency towards disinterme-
diation also extends to the creation, production and distribution
of popular fiction. Authors no longer necessarily have to pass
their work through the traditional chain of agents, editors, publi-
cists and marketers. The internet has removed these ‘barriers’ due
to the rise of electronic publishing platforms and the widespread
availability of e-readers and e-reading aps such as Kindle, digital

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 DRUGSTORE PAPERBACKS  39

documents library Scribd, online bookstore iBooks, and the self-

publishing platform Wattpad. The digital revolution has had a
drastic (and for publishers and booksellers, often devastating)
impact upon the production and distribution of popular fiction.
Domestic Noir Emerging publishing category associated with
(mainly) female-authored psychological thrillers in which sus-
pense and threat arises from conflicts and tensions associated
with domesticity and intimate relationships, be they familial or
marital. The term ‘Domestic Noir’ was first applied to this kind
of fiction by the novelist Julia Crouch, who, in a 2013 blog post,
described it as a sub-genre which ‘takes place primarily in homes
and workplaces, concerns itself largely (but not exclusively) with
the female experience, is based around relationships and takes as
its base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a chal-
lenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants’.
As in Gillian Flynn’s 2012 bestseller Gone Girl, the narrators of
many of these novels are morally complex and unreliable indi-
viduals who relate stories of domestic abuse, marital unhappi-
ness, emotional distress and dark secrets. The last characteristic
frequently lends itself to the emergence of climactic twists that
upend much of what we had previously believed to be true. As the
2013 publication of the anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted
Wives underlines, however, mid-twentieth-century American
authors such as Dorothy B. Hughes, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
and Margaret Millar were already writing tense tales in what we
would now call the ‘domestic noir’ vein long before the present-
day resurgence of interest in the term. The terms ‘chick noir’ and
‘grip lit’ are also being used to describe novels of this type.
Drabble Work of short fiction intended to be no more than one hun-
dred words long, although the term now more broadly can be
applied to any work of fiction written with a very restrictive word
count in mind.
Drugstore Paperbacks Term referring to the fact that in the US, mass-
market paperbacks were often sold in wire racks placed at the
front of pharmacies and grocery stores. Whilst cheap editions of
classics and literary fiction also featured, the racks were domi-
nated by popular genres such as romance, crime, westerns and
horror. These volumes often had lurid covers that emphasised the
suggestion that sex and violence were dramatised within (even
repackaged works of ‘classic’ and ‘literary’ fiction were marketed

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 40  DYSTOPIAN FICTION

in this way). Pocket Books, Avon, Fawcett and Penguin were the
major players in this market.
Dystopian Fiction Sub-genre of science fiction that features a society
(usually futuristic) which is in at least one significant respect
considerably worse than our own. The protagonist is usually
an oppressed individual whose desire for freedom and personal
fulfilment is stifled by a brutal and repressive state. The struggle
for liberty and happiness often drives the story, although many
of the most famous classic dystopian narratives feature bleak or
ambiguous endings that suggest that escape is ultimately impos-
sible. It remains the sub-genre of science fiction most likely to be
taken up by ‘literary’ authors, most likely because, like its flip-
side, the utopian narrative (which imagines a world better than
our own), dystopian fiction has always been a powerful means
of exploring current philosophical, political and social anxieties.
In recent years, dystopian young adult novels featuring teenag-
ers who must reluctantly battle to overcome totalitarian regimes
have become particularly popular, as have bleak visions of a
near-future United States riven by plague, factionalism, ecological
catastrophe and fascistic governments determined to erode female
independence and reproductive rights.

E
E-books Books or documents that have been digitised and distributed
as downloadable electronic files. The current popularity of the
e-book format is directly related to the arrival of broadband inter-
net and affordable, portable and user-friendly e-reading devices
such as the Kindle, NOOK and Kobo (although these devices are
now being superseded by e-reading apps downloaded onto tablet
computers and smart phones). Although the concept of e-books
has existed for many decades, earlier attempts to distribute books
as computer files or on CDs, floppy discs, or tape, were stymied
by a lack of convenience, portability and access. The release of
the first-generation Amazon Kindle in 2007 sparked a renewed
wave of consumer interest in the concept, and Christmas 2009
is generally cited as a tipping point for the e-book format, which
became ever more widely adopted and accepted in the years that
followed. Many e-books are actually scanned versions of hard-
copy editions, but increasingly, popular fiction is being initially
conceived of and distributed in e-book format. E-books com-

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 ESCAPISM  41

monly also include supplementary material. As a result, a book is

no longer necessarily a physical object.
E-reader Hand-held electronic device upon which e-books are read.
Although the likes of the Kobo, Nook, Kindle and Sony Reader
were dedicated e-readers with limited or no internet access, the
Kindle Fire, released in 2012, was also a multi-purpose tablet
computer, and like the Tesco Hudl, reflected a shifting consumer
preference for multi-function tablet devices. The 2014/15 fall in
e-reader sales is in part a result of market saturation (e-readers
are quite durable and long-lasting), and the fact that many people
now prefer to read their e-books on tablets and smart phones.
Eco-Fiction Fiction that takes as its main subject and plot impetus
environmental topics and themes: because climate change is a
major preoccupation of contemporary eco-fiction, it has much in
common with Cli-Fi.
Electronic Publishing Also known as digital or e-publishing: the term
refers to the process by which e-books are created, formatted,
distributed and marketed.
Epic Fantasy Sub-genre of fantasy also often referred to as ‘high’ or
‘heroic’ fantasy. Novels and stories in this tradition tend to be
heavily influenced by the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and the novel-
ists who emerged in his wake, and are usually characterised by
a vaguely medieval setting, quest-based narratives, the creation
of elaborate secondary worlds, and background trappings such
as armour, horses, limited technology and the use of swords and
magic. Many recent epic fantasy narratives encompass multiple
volumes, prequels, sequels and a large cast of characters.
Erotica/Erotic Fiction Form of popular fiction in which the narrative
is organised around sexual set-pieces, and the unfolding of the
physical/sensual relationship between the protagonists is the key
narrative focal point. The current mainstream presence of erotic
fiction (most romance publishers have specific imprints devoted
to erotica) owes much to the arrival of the e-reader, which facil-
itates the instantaneous and anonymous purchase of material
some readers might hesitate to buy in person in a bookstore.
Escapism The ability to fully ‘lose oneself’ in a book has always been
cited as one of the greatest attractions (and dangers) of popular
fiction. The purported ability (or inability) of a novel to help
its readers ‘escape’ from their everyday lives and cares via the
creation of a vividly realised imaginative world has long helped

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 42  EXCORPORATION

drive sales, and been posited as the reason why certain genres in
particular (especially the romance) have such loyal audiences.
The escapist potential of popular fiction also attracts suspicion
from those who see this kind of immersion in a ‘lowbrow’ liter-
ary work as frivolous or even sinister. It is no coincidence then
that metaphors related to drug-use and addiction are common
even when fairly sympathetic commentators are talking about the
appeal of genre fiction.
Excorporation Term associated with Cultural Studies scholar John
Fiske, who characterises it as ‘the process by which the subordi-
nate make their own culture out of the resources and commodi-
ties provided by the dominant culture’ (1989: 15). He cites the
example of mass-produced jeans which are deliberately modi-
fied by their purchaser via the addition of bleach or strategically
placed tears. Fanfiction could be considered an important form of
literary excorporation, in that such authors are appropriating and
personalising cultural products in inventive and imaginative ways
not considered or sanctioned by the original creator.

F
Fairytale Literary genre with its origins in oral tradition, existing in
almost every known culture, consisting of multiple tales told in
hundreds of different versions, modified according to the teller,
the audience and national or local context. Steven Jones Swann
argues that while the fairytale, like the folk tale, often features
ordinary people (as opposed to the gods who feature in myth),
they differ from folk stories in that they also depict ‘magical
or marvellous events or phenomena as a valid part of human
experience’ (2013: 9). In popular fiction, cinema and television in
recent years ‘retellings’ of well-known fairytales (and narratives
which incorporate established fairytale conventions) have experi-
enced a surge of popularity, with authors such as Naomi Novik,
Neil Gaiman, Francesca Lia Block and Holly Black proving par-
ticularly adept at reconfiguring familiar tales for contemporary
times. Actual fairies (or ‘The Fae’ as they are often character-
ised) regularly feature in paranormal romance and urban fantasy
narratives.
Fake Lore Term coined by folklorist Richard Dorson in 1950, which
he used to refer to deliberately manufactured/fabricated pseudo
folklore masquerading as actual folklore (which organically

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 FANFICTION  43

arises from the people themselves), often for commercial or tour-

ist-industry related ends. Of late the term has been frequently
deployed by scholars discussing the emergence of influential
horror memes on the internet, and in particular, the ‘Slender
Man’ mythos.
Family Saga A work of popular fiction which traces the origins and
fortunes of one family (or a number of connected families) over a
matter of decades or even centuries. Often combined with romance
and adventure sub-plots, and frequently featuring a historical
setting (as in the work of British author Catherine Cookson),
although elements of the family saga can surface in more spe-
cific genre form, such as in the gothic fairytale ‘Dollanganger’
series, by V. C. Andrews (and later, her ghost-writer, Andrew
Niederman) or the science fiction classic Dune (1965) by Frank
Herbert.
Fanfiction Fanfiction is not-for-profit derivative fiction written by
amateur authors. A work of fanfiction can be of any length, and is
both penned and posted online by the fans of a specific pre-exist-
ing fictional property, be it a novel or series of novels, television
show, film, or cartoon (although thriving fanfiction communi-
ties are also dedicated to the fictionalised exploits of real-life
actors, singers, celebrities and pop groups). Fanfiction arguably
has a history which long pre-dates the internet – the works of
authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Margaret
Mitchell and Charlotte Bronte have all, for instance, inspired a
wide range of prequels, sequels, mash-ups and retellings. Indeed,
as Anne Elizabeth Jamison notes, ‘fanfiction is an old story’,
but what is new is the current nature of ‘writing’s relationship
to technology and the media’ (2013: 17). The avid fandom that
surrounded the television series Star Trek (1966–9) is often said
to have spawned the fanfiction trend for ‘Slash Fiction’, in which
characters, often same-sex, who would not have been romanti-
cally or sexually involved in the source narrative, are paired up.
The advent of online culture means that there exists a multitude
of thriving sites dedicated to fanfiction. The most prominent at
time of writing include Archive of Our Own, FanFiction.net and
the self-­publishing platform WattPad. Fanfiction emerges from
collaborative communities and features a great deal of interac-
tion between authors and readers. It is particularly associated
with female readers and authors. Increasingly, certain fanfiction

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 44  FANDOM

authors with big online followings are transitioning to main-

stream publication; these include the likes of Cassandra Clare, E.
L. James and Anna Todd, whose One Direction fanfiction series
After, initially serialised on Wattpad, landed her a multi-book
publishing deal.
Fandom Fan community that has attached itself to a particular work
of popular fiction or popular culture, although the term is also
used to refer to fan culture in the broadest sense of the word.
The Fantastic Term associated with Structuralist critic Tzvetan
Todorov, for whom it is a form of literature defined by hesita-
tion and narrative uncertainty. ‘Once we choose one answer or
another, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the
uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation expe-
rienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, con-
fronting an apparently supernatural event’ (1975: 25). Todorov’s
definition is a fairly broad one that can arguably be applied to
many works of non-realist genre (and literary) fiction, in particu-
lar horror, the gothic and weird fiction.
Fantasy see entry in Major Popular Genres section
Fanzine Fan-created amateur publication devoted to articles, art and
photographs related to a particular sub-culture or genre (i.e. punk
music, cult or exploitation film, science fiction or horror fandom),
individual characters or creators, or a specific text, such as a cult
television show. Fanzines are always created and distributed by
the fans themselves, and have a distinctively homemade aesthetic
and a not-for- profit ethos. After their heyday in the 1970s and
1980s, fanzines have increasingly moved online.
Fast-Seller Term employed by Robert Escarpit (1966) to distinguish
between what he categorised as three types of best-seller: the fast-
seller sells a high number of copies in a short period of time, but
sales often peak quickly; the steady-seller has unspectacular but
consistently solid sales; whereas the best-seller combines the high
volume sales of the former with the consistency of the latter.
Fiction Factory Commercial enterprise devoted to the rapid creation,
writing and selling of popular fiction designed to sell quickly and
appeal to a wide (and often juvenile) audience. One of the earli-
est and most successful examples was Erasmus Beadle’s so-called
‘writers factory’, where authors were commissioned to churn out
dime novels for the mass market as quickly as possible on an
‘industrial’ scale (Ramsey and Zabelle Derounian-Stodola 2008:

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 FORMULA  45

266). Then came the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which dominated

commercial children’s fiction in the US for decades, and had a
large team of writers turning out titles (under house names) for
enduring series such as the Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys
and Nancy Drew. More recently, controversial American author
James Frey has been accused of setting up a modern day ‘fiction
factory’ staffed by recent MFA graduates commissioned to write
young adult fiction series such as the best-selling ‘Lorien Legacies’
novels.
Flash Fiction Short form fiction characterised by its extremely
restricted word count: also known as ‘micro fiction” and closely
related to the drabble.
Forensic Detective Story Sub-genre of crime fiction (owing much to
the work of Thomas Harris, Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs)
that revolves around a protagonist or protagonists whose job
involves solving the crime (often a grisly murder) by collecting
and analysing evidence from the crime scene, or the body itself.
Coroners, blood spatter analysts, medical examiners and foren-
sic anthropologists regularly feature. Narrative set-pieces involve
autopsies, evidence collection and the revelations they inspire.
Formula A reliance upon formula is frequently cited as one of the
characteristics that most distinguishes popular fiction from liter-
ary fiction; indeed, popular fiction is even sometimes referred
to as ‘formula fiction’. Popular texts invariably belong to a par-
ticular genre or combine elements of a number of genres, and
follow a particular set of narrative conventions that conform to
pre-existing reader expectations. John G. Cawelti characterises
formula as ‘a synthesis of cultural mythology with archetypal
story pattern’, and further suggests that ‘Formulas are cultural
products and in turn presumably have some sort of influence
on culture because they become conventional ways of represent-
ing certain images, symbols, themes, and myths’ (1976: 3, 20).
Popular fiction’s reliance upon formula has often provided grist
for critics for whom genre fiction can be dismissed as clichéd,
predictable and unoriginal. However, it is also the case that a
great deal of reader pleasure arguably comes from seeing how
formulaic elements within a particular work have been reconfig-
ured or subverted.

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 46  GEEK CULTURE

G
Geek Culture ‘Geek’ is a formerly pejorative term commonly used in
the US to refer to an individual who is perceived as intelligent but
socially awkward, and interested in subjects such as mathemat-
ics, engineering and computer science, in addition to supposedly
‘niche’ non-realist popular genres. However, mainstream popular
culture is now so dominated by forms of entertainment with their
roots in these very genres and modes, that it has persuasively
been posited that we are now in an era where ‘Geek culture’ –
characterised by an open and unapologetic passion for the likes
of videogames, fantasy, science fiction and superhero narratives
– dominates the cultural landscape.
Genre Broadly speaking, the term ‘genre’ refers to the set of char-
acteristics generally associated with the specific type of popular
fiction being referred to. All works of popular fiction belong
to a particular genre or – as is the case with the likes of urban
fantasy or weird fiction – are sub-genres combining recognisable
characteristics from a number of genres (indeed, popular fiction is
often described as ‘genre fiction’). Popular fiction’s reliance upon
classification by genre is one of its most significant characteristics.
As Ken Gelder observes, ‘the entire field of popular fiction is
written for, marketed and consumed generically: it provides the
primary logic for popular fiction’s means of production, formal
and industrial identification, and critical evaluation’ (2004: 40).
Popular fiction authors are generally associated with one specific
genre or set of related genres. Although the basic outlines of the
most significant popular genres were established by the middle
of the twentieth century (if not before), it is also important to
note, that as Scott McCracken remarks, ‘genre boundaries are
never absolutely fixed. Each new example of a particular genre
may modify and change what is understood by the classification
it comes under’ (1998: 12). New genres or sub-genres may also
arise as a result of particular commercial, historical or creative
circumstances (see, for instance, Cli-Fi).
Genrefication The so-called ‘genrefication’ or ‘genre debate’ relates
to the relationship between popular fiction and literary fiction,
and has been of particular significance in US literary circles in
recent years. The term was coined by New Yorker critic Joshua
Rothman, who argued in a 6 November 2014 piece for the maga-
zine that a ‘process of genrefication is occurring’. The term refers

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 GOOGLE BOOKS  47

to Rothman’s assertion that the boundaries between popular fic-

tion and literary fiction are being eroded by the increasing use of
genre conventions and tropes by younger writers who are as influ-
enced by popular fiction and popular culture as they are by the
‘traditional’ canon. The ‘genrefication’ debate is also a reflection
of the fact that the inclusion of genre components in a narrative
no longer leads to the automatic dismissal of a text by ‘highbrow’
commentators and publication venues.
Ghost Writer Author who is commissioned to write (or to co-write) a
book that will be publicly attributed to someone else. Ghost writ-
ing is particularly common when it comes to celebrity ‘authored’
memoirs, autobiographies and novels. Ghost writers are often
established professional authors who specialise in particular
kinds of publication – for instance, memoirs by musicians, or
sports stars. Within a popular fiction context, ghost writers can
also be contracted to write novels that will be published under
the name of (or in collaboration with) established genre authors.
Thriller writer James Patterson has, for instance, always been
very open about his frequent use of ghost writers, a tactic which
ensures that the Patterson ‘brand’ always produces multiple new
titles a year.
Goodreads Social media website which hosts and collates user-­
generated book recommendations and reviews. Members can
create individualised ‘virtual bookshelves’ that allow them to list,
rate and review books they have read or about to read. Members
can also see the ‘bookshelves’ of other users, and receive person-
alised recommendations. The site was launched in 2007 and as of
2016 claims to have around 40 million users. It has become an
important marketing tool for writers and publishers. The com-
pany was purchased by Amazon in 2013.
Google Books Digital library created by Google.inc which has the
stated aim of digitally scanning every book in the world. Google
Books quickly established partnerships with prominent university
libraries which allowed their collections to be digitised, and many
academic publishers and commercial publishers followed suit.
When accessing a title in Google Books, a user can view the entire
book (if it is out of copyright), have access to a select number
of pages (which publishers hope will make the user more likely
to buy the complete title via imbedded links to online booksell-
ers) or see a ‘snippet’ of the text concerned. The initiative has

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 48  GOTHIC

proved controversial with some authors, and indeed, Google was

sued for copyright infringement in the US by the Authors Guild.
However, in October 2015, a Federal court ruled that Google
Books’ display of excerpts from copyrighted texts was legally
acceptable under existing ‘fair use’ conventions.
Gothic Originally a vaguely pejorative term meaning vulgar, barba-
rous and old-fashioned (derived from the name of the Germanic
tribes who sacked ancient Rome), the gothic is a genre that thrives
on repression, concealment and terror. The gothic emerged as
a distinct publishing category in 1764 with the publication of
Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto, which provided
an oft-imitated blueprint. The new genre received a further jolt
of popularity in the 1790s in the wake of the upheaval caused
by the French Revolution. The ‘classical’ European gothic novels
tended to feature imperilled young heroines, sinister patriarchs,
aristocratic protagonists and a continental European setting. A
strong suspicion of Catholicism and ‘foreigners’ saturated the
work of English authors in particular. The presence of the super-
natural (or of supposedly supernatural elements which would
later be revealed as sinister chicanery) was another stock trope.
The gothic underwent a major configuration once it migrated to
the very different political, religious and geographical landscapes
of North America, and quickly became a key component in the
establishment of an independent and distinctively American liter-
ary tradition. Anxieties about race, genocide, slavery, the hidden
costs of stolen land and the seemingly vast and terrifying wilder-
ness came to the fore. Distinct regional variations – such as the
Southern gothic, the New England gothic, and the Midwestern
gothic – later emerged. In recent years, Gothic Studies has become
a particularly vibrant area of literary scholarship, and scholars
are beginning to explore gothic traditions from a much wider
range of national and regional contexts than ever before. An ever-
increasing number of sub-genres related to the rapidly shifting
contexts of contemporary life have been also identified, amongst
them the eco-gothic, the biomedical gothic, the suburban gothic
and the cyber gothic.
Gothic Romance (aka the ‘Modern Gothic’) The gothic romance sub-
genre (which actually has little to do with the gothic as defined
above) was particularly popular during the late 1960s and 1970s,
and helped establish the mass-market romance as a major mon-

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 GUILTY PLEASURES  49

eymaking concern for publishers. In the gothic romance, a chaste

heroine is alternately menaced and wooed by a potentially threat-
ening but charismatic older man with a terrible secret in his past.
Both Jane Eyre (1847) and Rebecca (1938) are usually cited as
major influences. The sub-genre’s popularity inspired feminist
critic Joanna Russ to write her classic 1973 article ‘Somebody’s
Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s my Husband: The Modern
Gothic’, in which she classified them as ‘neither love stories, nor
stories of women-as-victims. They are adventure stories with pas-
sive protagonists’ (1995: 111). The novels were usually sold in
drugstores and supermarkets.
Graphic Novel see entry in Major Popular Genres section
Grimdark Recently emerged sub-genre of heroic/epic fantasy that has
themes of an ‘adult’ and self-consciously gritty nature. Although
the vaguely medieval setting, swords and armoured warriors
often found in these texts recall the trappings of conventional
heroic/epic fantasy, grimdark texts are notable for their cynical,
bleak worldview, graphic depictions of sex and violence, and
‘mature’ take on traditional fantasy themes and tropes. Morally
compromised anti-heroes often feature as the main protagonists,
and the lines between good and evil are usually blurred beyond
recognition. The sub-genre is associated with authors such as
George R. R. Martin, Mark Lawrence and Joe Abercrombie.
‘Grip Lit’ Alternative descriptor for the post-2012 trend involving
female focused (and often, female written) psychological thrillers
(many of which have also been labelled as ‘domestic noir’). The
term is said to have been coined in 2015 by the Irish novelist
Marian Keyes, who used it to describe her fondness for ‘really
gripping books’ about ‘very recognisable women who live messy
lives’.
Guilty Pleasures Term implying that popular fiction is a form of
immersive entertainment readers consume with a certain embar-
rassment born of their awareness of its inherently frivolous
nature. For instance, in a much circulated 2012 piece on genre
fiction written for The New Yorker, Arthur Krystal characterised
the novelistic ‘Guilty Pleasure’ as something we enjoy reading
but are not proud of having consumed, once again deploying
the addiction metaphor that so often comes in criticism related
to popular fiction: ‘A fix in the form of a story, a narrative cock-
tail that helps us temporarily forget the narratives of our own

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 50  HABITUS

­ umdrum lives. And, for not a few readers, there’s the additional
h
kick of feeling like they’re getting away with something.’ As the
current mainstream popularity of erotica amongst female readers
in particular suggests, the advent of e-books has greatly facilitated
the purchase and consumption of novels of this nature, although
a ‘guilty pleasure’ can belong to any genre.

H
Habitus Term associated with Pierre Bourdieu. Our individual habi-
tus are said to be the ‘schemes of perception and appreciation’
that shape our perceptions of the world and equip us to interact
with the social structures and cultural products which surround
us (1993: 64). Our habitus is informed by our familial and insti-
tutional education, as well as our social class. It is not necessarily
fixed for life, in that new experiences and circumstances can alter
our individual preferences and prejudices. The concept is related
to Bourdieu’s exploration of the reasons why different social
classes develop markedly different cultural tastes.
Hardback Print edition of a novel that initially appears in a more
expensive, hard-backed edition. Although many works of popu-
lar fiction first appear in paperback or trade paperback editions,
hardback releases are often arranged for authors who have a reli-
able following of readers who will rush to buy their latest tome.
Hardbacks will also appear from debut authors whose work has
built up a great deal of pre-publication buzz. Rising e-book sales
has meant that there has recently emerged a trend for releasing
more attractive, limited edition hardbacks designed to attract
collectors, the rationale being that consumers used to instantly
downloading a cheaper digital version of the text will be tempted
by a more collectible hardcopy.
‘Hard-Boiled’ Detective Fiction Variety of American detective fiction
that emerged during the 1920s, having first arisen in pulp maga-
zines such as Black Mask, where stories by Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler first established many of the sub-genres most
salient characteristics. The typical ‘hard-boiled’ protagonist was
a tough, cynical loner, usually a dogged private investigator nego-
tiating ‘a violent and corrupt urban terrain’ (Horsley 2010: 32).
Harlequin This Canadian-based firm is the leading publisher of
romance fiction in the world, and has been for decades. Harlequin
was founded in 1949 in order to reprint cheap paperbacks for the

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 IMPRINT  51

mass-market audience. By the end of the 1950s, the company

had acquired the North American distribution rights to novels
produced by the British romance publisher Mills and Boons. They
bought the firm outright in 1971. Harlequin, currently owned by
Harper Collins, now has multiple imprints designed to appeal to
almost every conceivable customer demographic and generic vari-
ation of the romance novel. They also publish books in a range
of languages.
Highbrow Term used to describe a cultural product (or an individual)
which/who is perceived as intellectual, serious and challenging.
The term derives from the obviously erroneous belief that more
intelligent individuals have physically larger brains, and therefore
‘higher’ brows.
Historical Romance Work of romance fiction with a historical set-
ting. Popular sub-categories include Regency, Victorian, Tudor,
Medieval, Pioneer, ‘Pirate’ and Viking romances.
Homogenisation In a popular fiction context, the term refers to the
idea that the mass-produced and inherently formulaic nature of
genre fiction (as well as the tendency of popular writers to seek to
imitate past successes) means that the texts that result are repeti-
tive, predictable and familiar. Adorno and Horkheimer decried
what they viewed as the dismayingly standardised and numb-
ing effects of popular culture produced by what they called the
‘culture industry’. In 1960, American critic Dwight Macdonald
railed against what he saw as the homogenising effects of so
called ‘masscult’, which supposedly destroyed value judgements,
dissolved old barriers of class, tradition and taste, and ‘scrambles
everything together, producing what might be called homoge-
nised culture’ (2011: 11).
Horror see entry in Major Popular Genres section
Hybridisation In literary criticism more generally, hybridity is associ-
ated with post-colonial theory, but in a popular fiction context,
it refers to the suggestion that popular genres are increasingly
becoming more and more cross-fertilised, as tropes, themes and
character types traditionally associated with one genre turn up in
a text associated with another.

I
Imprint Specific brand within a publishing company which specialises
in marketing and publishing novels associated with a particular

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 52  INCORPORATION

popular genre or sub-genre. All major publishing companies have

imprints. Amazon Publishing, at the time of writing, has fourteen
imprints spanning a broad range of genres. So too does Hachette,
whose most prominent imprints include the Orbit science fic-
tion and fantasy line. Romance publisher Harlequin has imprints
related to a wide range of sub-genres and categories within that
broader generic designation. Imprints will usually have distinctive
cover branding and their own logo in order to aid rapid identifi-
cation by potential readers.
Incorporation Term coined by Cultural Studies scholar John Fiske
related to his concept of ‘excorporation’. It refers to the means
by which the dominant system neutralises signs of resistance
towards the dominant system by assimilating them into its own
business model (Fiske gives the example of companies like Levi’s
producing pre-ripped jeans in order to satisfy consumers who
might otherwise have altered the product themselves [2010:
13]). Within a popular fiction context, Amazon’s creation of the
‘Kindle Worlds’ imprint, which attempts to make money from
officially licenced works of fanfiction, could be seen as a classic
attempt at incorporation.
Interactive Fiction The term initially referred to text-driven com-
puter games popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, in which
the user decided their own fate by choosing whether or not to
follow directive onscreen prompts. Key early examples included
Adventureland (1978) and Zork (1977) but as computer process-
ing capacities improved, graphics and gameplay became much
more sophisticated, and these kinds of games ever more complex.
Interactive fiction of this type remains popular with enthusiasts
whose interest in the narrative possibilities of the format have
been greatly facilitated by online culture, and by the creation of
digital game-creation tools such as Twine, ‘an open source tool
for telling interactive, non-linear, stories’. It likely that e-books
will continue to become more and more interactive in nature.
Hyperlinks, video clips and animated graphics can all potentially
be added to the textual apparatus of a digital text with relative
ease.

K
Kindle Direct Publishing Online, free-to-use self-publishing platform
established by Amazon which enables e-book authors to upload

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 LEAVISITE  53

their fictional creations to Amazon’s online bookstore, which will

then host and sell the text for a cut of the proceeds. The platform
represents a major form of disintermediation in that it actively
encourages authors to bypass the traditional publishing gatekeep-
ers. This also means that authors have to copy edit, format,
design and market their own book (or pay someone else to do so).
Authors can decide which level of royalty they will receive if any
and when any copies are sold: at present they can be up to 70 per
cent. They also retain the copyright to their own work.
Kindle Serials E-books made available for download in a number of
episodic, regular instalments. Once a customer has paid for the
first instalment through Amazon, the rest are free and will down-
load automatically to their e-reader or tablet.
Kindle Singles E-book imprint owned by Amazon which specialises in
books of all kinds – be they fiction, non fiction, or memoir – of
between 5,000 and 30,000 words in length. Texts must be origi-
nal, self contained and not have been previously published.
Kindle Worlds Self-publishing platform hosted and devised by
Amazon that seeks to monetise and licence fanfiction. Would-be
authors choose a specific, officially licensed ‘World’ (by which
they mean an existing novel series, comic, film, or television show)
and once they have written a story that conforms to the standards
laid out by the rights holder, they can upload and sell their work
on the Kindle World’s e-publishing platform. Kindle Worlds has
been controversial with pre-existing fanfiction sites and authors
because the platform involves making commercial profit from
what had previously been a resolutely non-profit amateur endeav-
our. A previous high-profile attempt to monetise fanfiction, the
for-profit archive FanLib (2007–8) was unsuccessful.

L
Lad Lit Term used during the 1990s to refer to the work of British
authors such as Nick Hornby and Mike Gayle who were associ-
ated with humorous novels about the lives and loves of single
men in their late 20s and early 30s. ‘Lad Lit’ was sometimes pos-
ited as the male equivalent of chick-lit although it never achieved
the same cultural prominence.
Leavisite Term used to refer to critics or commentators who take a
perspective on literature and popular culture influenced by the
work of F. R. and Q. D. Leavis.

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 54  LEGAL THRILLER

Legal Thriller Legal thrillers feature a protagonist who works in the

legal profession and finds themselves wrapped up in a complex
and morally compromising case. The sub-genre is associated with
writers such as Steve Martini, Brad Meltzer and in particular,
John Grisham.
Liberal Humanism An essentially idealistic, romanticised approach to
literary criticism informed by the belief that, as Matthew Arnold
put it, culture should be ‘the best that has been thought and said
in the world’, and as such, a defence against the indignities and
cruelties of the modern world (2006: 5). ‘Culture’ in this sense
of the word always means ‘high culture’. The liberal humanist
approach played a key part in the development and acceptance of
literature as a valid topic for academic study.
Libraries Libraries have been immensely important in the develop-
ment of popular fiction, because they provide those without the
means to purchase books for themselves with access to a wide
range of texts. Library lending records have also long been an
important means of gaining a sense of popular reading habits.
As Ken Gelder notes, popular fiction ‘gained its broader circula-
tion during the twentieth century precisely through its association
with lending and commercial libraries’ (2004: 78).
Light Novels Form of fiction popular in Japan. Light novels are
designed to be readable, accessible, shorter genre novels aimed
at a predominately young adult audience. They are written in a
simplified form of Japanese alphabet in order to facilitate acces-
sibility and readability. They are often related to Anime tie-ins
and usually feature illustrations.
Literacy It was the emergence of a truly ‘mass’ audience that gave
rise to popular fiction as we understand it today, in that it cre-
ated the wider public appetite for accessible, sensationalist and
entertaining reading material. In Margaret Dalziel’s important
early academic investigation of Victorian popular fiction, the
mid-1840s is cited as the period when the mass production of
fiction which even the poorest citizen could buy began (1957:
4), although as Victor Neuburg (1977) would later note, there
was already a mass reading public in Britain by the end of the
eighteenth century. Clive Bloom also stresses the pivotal role that
literacy played in the development and origins of popular fiction,
and referring to the late-Victorian era in particular, writes of the
way in which ‘the vast new pool of readers created by elementary

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 LITERARY FICTION  55

education produced a huge new market for literary entertainment

and printed information’ (2008: 32).
Literary Fiction The relationship between ‘literary fiction’ and pop-
ular fiction has always been complicated. For critics such as
F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, there was a clear and compelling distinc-
tion between ‘good’, artistic, challenging works of literary fiction
(which could only be properly valued and appreciated by an elite
but unappreciated minority) and the standardised, degraded and
degrading cultural products of the post-industrial age, a line of
thought that would be reflected to some extent in critiques of
mass culture undertaken by the likes of Adorno and Horkheimer
and Dwight Macdonald. Marc Angenot (1975) argued that popu-
lar/genre fiction was a form of paraliterature existing outside of
the parameters of literary fiction which also provided a means for
literary fiction to define itself as what it is not, a definition which
was expanded upon by Christopher Pawling (1984: 2).
Leslie Fielder, fundamentally objecting to the idea of a divide
between ‘high’ and ‘low’, suggested that the idea of a specific
category of ‘popular fiction’ was the invention of ‘certain theoriz-
ers after the fact. It exists generically in the perception of elitist
critics [. . .] it will, therefore, cease to exist as a category when
we cease to regard it in the way we have been misled into doing’
(1969: 30). More recently, Ken Gelder has argued at length that
popular fiction is ‘best conceived of as the opposite of Literature
(to which I shall ascribe a capital L, distinguishing it from litera-
ture as a field of writing). The reverse is also true, and in fact,
it can often seem as if Literature and popular fiction exist in a
constant state of mutual repulsion or repudiation’ (2004: 11).
Gelder argues that as a result, popular fiction is best considered
on its own terms, a point anticipated by Tzvetan Todorov in his
essay ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’ (1977), when he argued
that, ‘as a rule, the literary masterpiece does not enter any genre
save perhaps its own, but the masterpiece of popular literature
is precisely the book which best fits its genre’ and further com-
ments that ‘the same measurements do not apply to “high” art
and “popular” art’ (1977: 43, 44). In recent years it has also
been suggested that the perceived boundaries between ‘literary
fiction’ and ‘popular fiction’ are becoming increasingly blurred,
as contemporary American writers in particular frequently make
use of plots, themes and character types more usually associated

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 56  LITERARY GUILD

with genre fiction (see also genrefication). However, there has

also long been a general recognition that that which we define as
‘popular’ does indeed have some specific characteristics which are
less pronounced in literary fiction (such as a reliance on formula,
categorisation by genre and sub-genres, and a tendency to be
more visibly shaped by commercial and technological considera-
tions), and there is also the fact that having some sense of these
characteristics makes the academic study of the subject a more
clearly defined endeavour.
Literary Guild American Book Club, founded in 1927, which is still
in existence. The guild is run on a subscription basis: customers
pay a set monthly fee and are sent a pre-selected number of newly
published books by mail order, a list which often features pre-
selected genre titles.
Lowbrow Form of popular fiction is supposedly unchallenging, unin-
tellectual and formulaic, in contrast to challenging and artistic
works of highbrow significance. A person can also be ‘lowbrow’
themselves. In an influential 1915 essay, Van Wyck Brooks
claimed that American culture had been divided into ‘highbrow’
and ‘lowbrow’ camps since the days of Puritan intellectual
Jonathan Edwards (who epitomised the former) and Benjamin
Franklin (the latter) (Jumonville 2007: 205).

M
Magazines Magazines specialising (partially or wholly) in popular fic-
tion were for generations a key means of distributing and sharing
these kinds of narratives, from proto-magazines such as the penny
dreadfuls and penny periodicals that began to appear in the 1830s
and 1840s to more respectable publications such as The Strand
Magazine, Blackwood’s Magazine and Household Worlds. Pulp
magazines also helped shape the US dime novel market of the
late nineteenth century. Amazing Science Fiction and Astounding
both had a great deal of influence upon the development of the
so-called ‘Golden Age’ of American science fiction in the 1920s
and after, whilst New Worlds did the same for the British incar-
nation of the genre, and was later central to the ambitious and
experimental ‘New Wave’ of British SF from the 1960s. Black
Mask was pivotal to the establishment of hard-boiled detective
fiction. Authors published in Weird Tales helped shape horror,
fantasy and weird fiction to an immeasurable extent. Though

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 MASH-UP  57

they no longer wield quite the same power that they once did,
several of the most notable genre magazines persist, as do a wide
range of print and online small press speciality magazines such
as Cemetery Dance (horror) and Albedo One (science fiction) as
well as titles devoted to specific sub-genres (such as grimdark and
bizarro fiction). During the mid-twentieth century, mainstream
magazines such as Playboy and Esquire regularly published genre
fiction. In addition, the history of what Nicholas Daly has char-
acterised as ‘Popular Modernism’ is intrinsically linked to the
thriving magazine industry of the 1920s and 1930s.
Manga Japanese comic book usually sold in digest format, wide range
of popular genres and specific sub-genres unique to manga, such
as Shōnen (boy’s manga), Shojo Manga (girl’s manga) and Yaoi
(boy’s love – magazines aimed at a predominately female audi-
ence that focus on romantic/homosocial relationships between
young men). Even when translated into other languages, manga
books are still read from right to left, and have a distinctive visual
style that tends to privilege image over plot. The modern manga
industry’s emergence is often linked to the success of Osamu
Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy (original run 1952–68).
Mash-Up Term originally deployed in relation to dance music to refer
to the process by which two (or more) previously existing songs
are combined to create a new, hybrid track. The term came to be
used to describe the post-2009 trend for rewriting classic literary
novels in order to incorporate genre elements. The originating
text is Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
(2009) which retains much of Austen’s original prose and plot
but transforms Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters into zombie-­
battling warriors (although in this case, the undead are known as
‘Dreadfuls’). The success of this satirical take on Austen spawned
a host of similar experiments, many of them also published by
Grahame-Smith’s publisher Quirk Books. A number of nine-
teenth-century classics were subsequently rewritten in order to
incorporate, variously, vampires (Jane Slayre, 2010), love inter-
ests of a lupine nature (Little Women and Werewolves, 2010) and
even robots (Android Karenina, 2010). Real-life historical figures
such as Abraham Lincoln, Queen Victoria and, more recently,
suspected axe-murderer Lizzy Borden (Cherie Priest’s Maplecroft,
2014) have also transformed into defenders against all manner of
supernaturally inspired threat, although technically these efforts

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 58  MASS-MARKET PAPERBACK

are not mash-ups, because their prose and plots are original and
not derived from an existing ‘classic’ literary property.
Mass-Market Paperback Term used in the US publishing industry to
refer to cheap, widely available and attractively packaged paper-
backs designed to attract as wide an audience as possible. The
company usually credited with pioneering the format is Pocket
Books, which was founded in 1939 in order to sell affordable
reprints of bestselling hardback volumes. During the post-war
era, companies such as Dell, Fawcett and Bantam emerged, all
of them, like Pocket, specialising in cheaply produced, affordable
fiction sold in drug stores, airports, supermarkets and grocery
stores. Although many ‘classic’ works of literary fiction were
also reprinted, the mass-market paperback industry was from the
start dominated by works of genre fiction. That trend accelerated
when Pocket started to commission their own ‘paperback origi-
nals’ which would bypass the hardcover stage entirely. According
to John B. Thompson, the market for mass-market paperbacks
began to reduce in the 1980s and 1990s because a more affluent
readership was willing to buy hardcovers (which had themselves
become more affordable) and trade paperbacks (2010: 39).
Mass Culture According to Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy
(1957), a new ‘mass culture’ was replacing the crude but genu-
inely ‘of the people’ kind of authentic urban working-class cul-
ture that he associated with his childhood (1957: 24). The ‘new
style of popular publications’ Hoggart critiqued was said to be
problematic not because the works failed to be ‘highbrow’ (1957:
24), but because they were ultimately ‘full of a corrupt brightness,
of improper appeals and moral evasions’ (1957: 340). Indeed,
‘These publications do not contribute to a sounder popular art
but discourage it [. . .] it is easier to kill the old roots than to
replace them with anything comparable’ (1957: 139). As in the
earlier formulations of Adorno and Horkheimer, mass culture
is here seen as being imposed from above, unlike ‘folk culture’,
which is said to arise organically from the people themselves.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s term the ‘culture industry’ is closely
related, as is the term ‘masscult’. The products of ‘mass culture’
are generally perceived to be mass-produced, standardised and
essentially inauthentic.
Masscult Term coined by Dwight Macdonald, who, in an influen-
tial 1960 essay for the Partisan Review entitled ‘Masscult and

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 MEDICAL THRILLER  59

Midcult’, argued that culture in the West was divided between

‘high’ or traditional culture, and ‘a novel kind that is manu-
factured for the market’ which he dubbed ‘masscult’ (2011: 3).
Macdonald characterised it as ‘a parody of high culture’ that
wasn’t really culture at all. He argued that ‘masscult’ constituted
the vast majority of new media, including radio, television and
movies. In a position that owed much to the Frankfurt School,
Macdonald claimed that masscult was a homogenised, standard-
ised form of middlebrow, bourgeois cultural product ‘fabricated
by technicians hired by businessmen’, which failed to provide the
genuine emotional catharsis and aesthetic satisfaction offered by
high culture, and granted only distraction and stimulation, but
nothing more substantial (2011: 13).
The Masses Term often used to describe the great mass of ‘ordi-
nary’ or ‘common’ working and middle-class people that make
up the majority of the population, as opposed to the supposedly
highbrow educational and cultural elite, who are sometimes said
to constitute an embattled and undervalued minority. Popular
culture is often said to have a particular appeal to ‘the masses’
by critics who are opposed to its ‘homogenising’ and even ‘anti-­
democratic’ effects. When writing about the response that the
English intelligentsia had to mass culture during the early twenti-
eth century, John Carey has argued that the ‘metaphor of the mass
serves the purposes of individual self-assertion because it turns
other people into a conglomerate. It denies them the individuality
which we ascribe to ourselves and to people we know’ (2002: 21).
Media Tie-In Work of popular fiction (usually a novel) commissioned
by the rights holder of an existing pop culture property, be it a
film, television series, or video game. It could be an expanded
novelisation of a screenplay, or a new story based on existing
characters and story components. As was the case with the Star
Wars franchise and Dr Who, tie-in novels can help keep interest
in a property alive even when the source franchise has stalled.
The term also refers to non-fiction publications such as episode
guides, encyclopaedias and ‘making of’ books.
Medical Thriller The medical thriller as we know it today owes much
to the considerable success of doctor-turned-author Robin Cook,
whose 1977 novel Coma combined a ‘plucky heroine-in-peril’
story with a plot that involved illegal organ harvesting. Cook
would go on to write many other thrillers in the same vein. The

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 60  MELODRAMA

medical thriller usually features a protagonist with a medical

background who works to solve a mystery set wholly or partially
within a medical context and/setting. Unauthorised experiments
and rogue physicians who play God are common, and the thrills
are supplemented by medical terminology. Tess Gerritsen, Peter
James and Michael Palmer are more recently associated with the
sub-genre.
Melodrama Though the term is more often applied to a certain type
of Hollywood cinema, which involves big emotions, lavish pro-
duction values and dramatic story beats, as Nick Daly notes, by
the mid-nineteenth century, the melodrama was ‘the dominant
mode of popular fiction. Combining as it did sentiment, sus-
pense, spectacle and morality (2012: 37), John G. Cawelti has
also observed that the melodrama does not necessarily belong
to any one genre, but rather can incorporate aspects of several
different genres. Chief amongst these are the romance, family
saga, adventure story, combined in a deliberately non-naturalistic
fashion, set in ‘a world that is purportedly full of the violence
and tragedy we associate with “the real world” but that in this
case seems to be governed by some benevolent moral principle’
(1976: 45).
Meme Term originally coined by Richard Dawkins to describe an idea
that passes from one brain to another. Now most widely used to
describe any concept, image, character, catchphrase or trope that
is spread via the internet, such as the ‘Slender Man’ mythos.
Men’s Adventure Magazines Magazines targeted at a male audience
popular in the US between the 1950s and the 1970s. They spe-
cialised in lurid ‘true stories’ with an emphasis on crime, as well
as heavily sensationalised accounts of historical episodes, tales of
adventure and sex advice. Many of the titles featured eye-catching
covers. They were displaced by the increasing presence of porno-
graphic magazines from the early 1970s. The most prominent
titles included Men’s Adventure, Rage, Wildcat Adventures, Stag
and Real Men.
Midcult Term coined by Dwight Macdonald in 1960. It is essentially
another word for ‘middlebrow’ – a hybrid form of popular cul-
ture that he saw as occupying ground half way between mass
culture and high culture that ‘pretends to respect the standards
of High Culture while in fact waters them down and vulgarises
them’ (2011: 35).

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 NET BOOK AGREEMENT  61

Middlebrow Term which arose in the 1920s and is usually used to

describe a form of popular culture which occupies a middle ground
between high culture and low or mass culture. The middlebrow
is often associated with an aspirational middle-class audience. In
popular fiction studies the term is often used to describe female-
authored popular novels written in the UK between the world
wars. Nicola Humble emphasises the strong class associations
and mutability of the term, and contends that texts move in and
out of the category depending on who is reading them, in that
having a largely female audience, or considerable commercial
popularity can be enough for some commentators to classify a
text as ‘middlebrow’ (2012: 91).
Middle Mind Term coined by Curtis White in 2003. The ‘middle
mind’, argues White, promises intelligence and seriousness but in
fact flattens distinctions and ‘turns culture into mush’, rendering
value judgements meaningless. As such, it is said to degrade and
impoverish both the imagination and society as a whole. The
term resembles Macdonald’s earlier conception of ‘midcult’.
Misery Lit Non-fiction genre in which autobiographical tales of great
personal hardship and suffering are narrated, often related to ter-
rible abuse and deprivation the author claims to have experienced
as a child, although tales of adult addiction, illness and tragedy
can also feature.
Mommy Porn Erotic fiction that is supposed to appeal to a female
audience in their 30s and 40s. The term was widely used by the
media in relation to the massive success of Fifty Shades of Grey
(2011) and its many imitators.
Mushroom Publishers Term used to describe the many small publish-
ing companies specialising in genre fiction which sprang up in
Britain during the post-war period.

N
NaNoWriMo National novel writing month – a popular online chal-
lenge which takes place every November, during which partici-
pants undertake to write the first draft of a novel (or at least
50,000 words) during the allotted time period.
Net Book Agreement Agreement in 1900 that allowed British pub-
lishers to set the retail price of their stock and deny booksellers
the right to offer discounted copies. It was declared illegal by
the Office for Fair Trade in 1997, when the British publishing

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 62  NEW ADULT FICTION

i­ndustry was deregulated. At this point new sales tactics such

as ‘loss leaders’ (books deliberately under-priced so as to attract
customers into shops) and massively discounted copies became
possible. These innovations are said by many commentators to
have had a particularly negative impact upon smaller and inde-
pendent booksellers. The end of the NBA also radically changed
how author payments were negotiated.
New Adult Fiction Relatively new publishing industry term refer-
ring to novels supposedly written for college age readers/recent
graduates (aged between 18 and 30) who have begun to ‘age
out’ of young adult books. New Adult Fiction tends to deal with
protagonists navigating the adult world, relationships, first jobs
and so on.
The New Weird Critical term that has emerged since 2000. It is
a hybrid sub-genre of fantasy that also contains elements of
horror and science fiction and tends to resist conventional
generic classification. The roots of the new weird are said to lie
in the writing of ‘New Wave’ science fiction authors such as J.
G. Ballard and Jack Vance, as well as Horror writers such as
Clive Barker and Thomas Ligotti. Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern
Reach (2014) trilogy has recently been hailed as a masterpiece
of the ‘new weird’.
Nordic Noir (also known as Scandi Noir) Term used to describe
the wave of crime and detective fiction written by Scandinavian
authors which rose to global prominence following the immense
success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, the television
shows Forbrydelsen/The Killing (Denmark, 2007–12) and Broen/
Bron/The Bridge (a Danish/Swedish co-production, 2011–). A
new appetite for Scandinavian crime fiction in English translation
paved the way for the publication in English of new authors but
also encouraged the translation and reprinting of existing series
from writers based in Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Norway,
such as Swedish authors Maj Sjöwell and Per Wahlöö (the team
behind the long-running Martin Beck series), Henning Mankell
(known for the Kurt Wallander series), Norwegian authors Karin
Fossum, Jo Nesbø and Anne Holt, and Icelandic author Arnaldur
Indriđason who had all amassed an international following before
the term began to be widely deployed. The basic characteristics
of ‘Nordic Noir’ include a Scandinavian author and setting and
a concern with issues of social justice and state/police corruption

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 PAPERBACK REVOLUTION  63

– the dark side of the post-war social democracy is a particular

focus of Swedish and Danish crime fiction in particular.
Novelisation Term used when a television series or film script is
adapted into a novel format. Novelisations were particularly
common when global film release dates were much more stag-
gered than they are now. Most major US film releases would be
accompanied by novelisation of the script, sometimes ostensibly
written by the original director/writer (as was the case with the
novelisation of Star Wars, credited to George Lucas but ghost-
written by SF author Alan Dean Foster, who has recently also
novelised Star Wars: The Force Awakens, 2015). Genre televi-
sion has long benefited from novelisations that explore on-going
plot lines or even spin off into new adventures featuring already
established characters. A few, more recent TV shows (such as
British novelist David Hewson’s adaptations of the Danish crime
series The Killing) have inspired novelisations which can be con-
sidered fully realised works of fiction in their own right, as have
video games series such as Halo. The advent of VHS, DVD and,
more recently, digital film downloading has meant that the public
appetite for the kind of supplementary material featured in nov-
elisations of the original shooting script has waned considerably.
Nuclear Fiction Hybrid sub-genre most notable between the 1950s
and the 1980s – the height of the Cold War – which dramatised
plot elements and anxieties related to the possession, deploy-
ment and use of nuclear weaponry. Nuclear fiction usually com-
bines elements of the techno thriller, apocalyptic fiction and the
suspense novel, though not necessarily all in the same novel.
Examples include melancholic tales of radiation poisoning such
as Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and Raymond Briggs’s
graphic novel When the Wind Blows (1982), more hopeful ‘rising
from the ashes’ stories such as Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959),
and tense tales of diplomatic brinksmanship such as Fail Safe
(Eugene Burdick and Henry Wheeler, 1962).

P
Paperback Revolution Term used to refer to the process by which
paperback books became affordable and widely available. It is
particularly associated with Penguin Books Ltd founder Allen
Lane, who established the firm in 1935 in order to make sure that
ordinary readers would have access to high-quality, ­intellectually

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 64  PARALITERATURE

edifying books. The Penguin line from the start combined liter-
ary texts and non-fiction titles with works of popular fiction,
­beginning with authors such as Agatha Christie. In the US, pub-
lishers such as Fawcett, Pocket Books and Avon were also pivotal
in the manufacture and distributing of paperbacks. In 1960, sales
of paperback books for the first time exceeded those of hardbacks
(Howard 2005: 148).
Paraliterature Term usually associated with French critic Marc
Angenot, although it has also been used by other critics, including
Leslie Fiedler and Christopher Pawling. It is essentially another
way of describing popular/genre fiction, with an emphasis here on
the fact that it is a means for literary fiction to define itself as what
it is not. ‘Paraliterature’ can be described as non-canonical fiction
that exists alongside but separate from literary fiction.
Paranormal Romance Hybrid sub-genre combining elements of fan-
tasy, romance and horror in which the (usually female) protago-
nist finds herself romantically entangled with a male character who
is of supernatural or partially supernatural origin. It is also not
uncommon for the heroine to have supernatural abilities herself,
or to develop them as the series continues. Paranormal romance
is one of the major new publishing categories to have emerged
since 2000. The paranormal romance boom owes much to the
Twilight series (2005–8) and its accompanying film adaptations.
However, authors whose work predates Stephenie Meyers, such as
Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris, did much to establish
the parameters of the format (even though their fiction is argu-
ably more urban fantasy than paranormal romance). Paranormal
romance has elements in common with urban fantasy (not least
the conceit that there exists a parallel world of supernatural beings
existing alongside our own), but whilst romantic entanglements
occasionally surface in urban fantasy, in paranormal romance,
they are always the prime narrative focus. In addition, whilst
paranormal romance, like romance in general, tends to attract
mainly female authors and readers, the urban fantasy has many
prominent male authors and many series with male protagonists.
Pen Name Alternative identity adopted by an author who wishes
his or her work to be published under a name different from
their own. There are various reasons why a writer of popular
fiction might publish under a pen name. It was once common
for female authors to obscure their identities so as to hide the

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 PENNY DREADFUL  65

fact that they had taken up the ‘unladylike’ activity of fiction

writing. Hence, the Brontë sisters first published under mascu-
line pen names, whilst Mary Ann Evans became ‘George Eliot’.
Science fiction author ‘James Tiptree Jr’ was praised for his dis-
tinctively ‘masculine’ writing style before it was revealed that ‘he’
was actually a woman named Alice B. Sheldon. Sometimes pen
names are adopted because an author strongly associated with
one genre wishes to write in another. Stephen King published for
years as ‘Richard Bachman’, until his ruse was uncovered by a
fan in 1985. More recently, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling
attempted a similar feat, but her real identity was leaked shortly
after her first crime novel, credited to ‘Robert Galbraith’, was
published. Authors also sometimes use a pen name but publicise
their responsibility for the text in question. This is generally a
way of signalling that novels written under the alternative per-
sona differ from those usually associated with the author. So,
for instance, romance novelist Nora Roberts publishes romantic
suspense as ‘J. D. Robb’, Agatha Christie wrote romances under
the name ‘Mary Westmacott’, crime novelist Ruth Rendell wrote
psychological thrillers as ‘Barbara Vine’ and Irish literary novelist
John Banville writes 1950s-set crime novels as ‘Benjamin Black’.
Penguin Books British firm founded by publishing executive Allen
Lane in 1935. Lane wanted to make quality contemporary fic-
tion available to a mass audience at an affordable price. Penguin
books were intended to be sold at train stations and chain stores
such as Woolworths. Their first list was a combination of literary
fiction and popular fiction. Major imprints soon added: Puffin,
which specialised in children’s books, began in 1940 whilst the
Penguin Classics line, which provided affordable reprints of clas-
sic literary texts, was established in 1946. The Penguin Press,
which allowed the company to publish in hardback as well as
paperback, was established in 1967. Penguin merged with fellow
conglomerate Random House in 2012.
Penny Dreadful Cheaply printed, mass-produced serial literature
intended primarily for a working-class audience that was par-
ticularly popular during the mid- to late- nineteenth century. The
material featured in the so-called ‘penny dreadfuls’ or ‘penny
bloods’ tended towards the lurid, sensationalist, melodramatic
and grotesque. These texts were usually published in a pam-
phlet format and also often featured sensationalist illustrations.

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 66  PLOT

Fictionalised true crime stories were particularly popular, as

were reprints of gothic novels. The most famous penny dreadfuls
included the Sweeney Todd story A String of Pearls (1846–7) and
Varney the Vampire (1845–7), both written by James Malcolm
Rhymer and Thomas Peckett Prest.
Plot One of the main differences between popular fiction and liter-
ary fiction is the importance afforded plot in the former. Plots in
popular fiction are often relatively familiar to the reader before
they even open the book, at least in outline. When a text belongs
to a certain genre or sub-genre the reader can reasonably expect
the narrative to contain at least some of the typical plot devel-
opments associated with that particular genre. For instance, a
detective novel demands that there be a crime to be solved, whilst
heroic fantasy often involves a quest of some sort and a battle
between the forces of good and evil. In popular fiction, plot is
generally considered to be more important than language, tone or
style. By way of contrast, in literary fiction all of these elements
are considered key components of the ‘literariness’ of a text, and
plot is often downplayed. Whereas popular fiction texts are often
packed with page-turning incident, it is fairly common for a work
of literary fiction to have a relatively sparse plot.
Public Lending Right (PLR) System which allows authors to register
and receive payments in return for library loans of their work
which operates in most European countries (and is known as the
Public Lending Remuneration system in Ireland). It is also a useful
means of gauging who are the most commonly borrowed authors
in a particular year. At time of writing, thirty-three countries have
established a PLR system. The US is not yet amongst them.
Police Procedural Sub-genre of crime fiction in which the course and
details of the official investigation into a crime (often a murder)
forms the main plot. The main characters will usually be law
enforcement offers working in an official capacity for the state
and within the limits of their profession. As Lee Horsley observes,
the emphasis ‘is on a collaborative process of investigation requir-
ing hierarchical institutional relationships, well-established sys-
tems of communication, and shared expertise’ (2010: 35).
Popular Modernism Term used by Nicholas Daly to describe the point
at which, essentially, mass culture and modernism begin to cross
over with one another. Daly argues that the work of Victorian
popular fiction authors such as Stoker, Haggard and Doyle rep-

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 PRINT-ON-DEMAND (POD)  67

resents an important strand of nascent modernism, and suggests

that their fiction was ‘formed in the same historical mould as
literary modernism’ (2000: 9). The term has been applied to the
reassessment of modernism in order to consider the movement’s
engagement with mass publication outlets (many of the leading
authors also frequently published in mass-market popular maga-
zines) as well as the relationship between modernism and popular
genres, with particular attention being paid to so-called ‘pulp
modernism’ supposedly epitomised by the writing of authors such
as Raymond Chandler.
Popular Fiction see Introduction for a detailed definition
Posthumous Publication Posthumous publication occurs when a
work of fiction is published for the first time after the death of
the author. Within a popular fiction context there have been
some notable examples of posthumous publication. Stieg Larsson
died shortly before the Millennium trilogy (originally published
between 2005 and 2007) made him one of the best-selling authors
in the world. James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s final novel, The
Man with the Golden Gun (1965) and short fiction collection
Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966) were also published
after his death. More recently, the final ‘Discworld’ novel, The
Shepherd’s Crown (2015) was published after the death of author
Terry Pratchett. Sometimes a work partially finished before the
author’s death is completed by another writer or editor, as was
the case with J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (1977), which
was prepared for publication by his son, Christopher.
Potboiler A work of fiction supposedly written for purely financial
motives, containing sensational plot elements contrived to appeal
to the widest possible audience.
Print-On-Demand (POD) Companies offering print-on-demand ser-
vices print books in hard copy format once firm orders have been
received (rather than printing in advance of orders, as is the usual
practice within publishing). Such services have become more pop-
ular in recent years thanks to the rise in the number of authors
who are self-publishing and self-promoting, because POD allows
for small and relatively inexpensive initial print runs. Major POD
platforms at time of writing include Lulu Press, Smashwords and
the Amazon-owned CreateSpace, which also hosts a digital pub-
lishing platform, and therefore allows authors to sell their work
as e-books and in hard copy.

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 68  PRO-FIC

Pro-Fic Professional Fiction. Term used within fanfiction circles to

refer to professionally published and commercially sold works.
Pulp Fiction Cheap, disposable and readily available genre fiction,
published in magazine, dime novel or paperback novel format,
usually with colourful cover art. Pulp fiction is named after the
cheap wood pulp that was used to make the paper these kinds
of texts were initially printed on. However, as Lee Server notes,
the term ‘pulp’ soon came to encompass both a categorical and
aesthetic meaning as well:

pulp as a genus of imaginative reading matter distinguished by

mass production, affordability, an intended audience of common as
opposed to elite readers, a dependence on formula and genre; and
pulp as literature aimed at the pleasure centres of the reader, primarily
concerned with sensation and escape, variously intended to excite,
astonish or arouse. (2009: xi)

The heyday of pulp fiction occurred between the late-nineteenth

century and the mid-twentieth century. Certain genres achieved
particular success during the pulp era, amongst them the west-
ern, crime (in particular hard-boiled detective fiction), true crime,
science fiction, weird fiction and adventure stories. The term
‘pulp fiction’ is also sometimes used to describe popular fiction
more generally (as in Scott McCracken’s Pulp: Reading Popular
Fiction, 1998).

R
Remediation Process by which one form of technological medium
begins to replace or improve upon another that performs a simi-
lar role. Jay David Bolter argues for instance that ‘Digital technol-
ogy is turning out to be one of the more traumatic remediations in
the history of western writing’ (2001: 24).
Revenant Bestseller Term used by John Sutherland to describe a book
which returns to the bestseller lists after being out of them for
more than a year.
Romance see entry in Major Popular Genres section
Romantic Suspense Sub-genre of the romance novel including a strong
element of mystery/jeopardy alongside the main love story plot.
Romantic suspense is often said to have been pioneered by the
British author Mary Stewart, and is now most famously associ-

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 SELF-PUBLISHING  69

ated with Nora Roberts, who publishes her romantic suspense

novels as ‘J. D. Robb’.

S
School Story Sub-genre of children’s literature/YA fiction which has
a school setting – often a British public school in which children
are boarders. The typical school story follows a naïve young pupil
encountering the rules and rituals of the place for the first time,
with the plot often being shaped by the structure of a school term.
One of the most significant early school stories is the Victorian
bestseller Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) by Thomas Hughes,
which followed the protagonist from initial entry as a terrified
youngster to his triumphant departure as a well-rounded young
gentleman. Authors such as Enid Blyton, Elinor Brent Dwyer,
Diana Wynne-Jones and J. K. Rowling have written school sto-
ries, in the latter two instances combining them with fantastical
elements. There is also a long tradition of American high-school
set tales in both popular film and fiction (and even a few boarding
school narratives), but these tend to differ substantially from their
British counterparts.
Science Fiction see entry in Major Popular Genres section
Scientific Romance Term used in the UK to describe the imaginative
tales of adventure, innovation and scientific invention written by
authors such as H. G. Wells. As Brian Stableford notes, the term
never caught on in the US because Hugo Gernsback’s alterna-
tive descriptor ‘science fiction’ was soon widely deployed there
instead (2006: 468).
Scientific Thriller Sub-genre of the thriller in which the main premise
is related to a threat posed by a new scientific innovation or
discovery. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is arguably one
of the first novels of this type. Michael Crichton, author of The
Andromeda Strain (1969), Jurassic Park (1990) and Prey (2002)
helped establish the template for the modern day scientific thriller.
Self-Publishing Process by which an author decides to bypass tradi-
tional publication models and oversee the publishing, distribution
and marketing of their own work. The self-publishing market has
been boosted by the electronic publishing boom, which facili-
tated the establishment of e-publishing platforms such as Amazon
Kindle Direct, Wattpad and Smashwords. It is now not uncom-
mon for authors whose work was initially self-published online

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 70  SENSATION FICTION

(such as science fiction authors Hugh Howey and Andy Weir and
paranormal romance author Amanda Hocking) to be picked up
by mainstream publishers after their work has attracted a sub-
stantial following.
Sensation Fiction A variety of popular fiction that emerged in
Victorian Britain during the mid-nineteenth century and after-
wards. As Pamela K. Gilbert observes, ‘the new genre was dis-
tinctively transgressive in that it was thought to appeal directly
to the ‘nerves’, eliciting a physical sensation with its surprises,
plot twists and startling revelations’ (2011: 2). Sensation fiction
helped pave the way for the present day thriller. It was immensely
popular in Britain from the 1860s onwards, and was associ-
ated with writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood,
Charles Dickens (whose fiction often contained distinctively ‘sen-
sational’ elements) and Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone
(1868) and The Woman in White (1860). Sensation novels fre-
quently dramatised themes that were considered too lurid to be
openly spoken of, such as madness, murder, spousal abuse and
illegitimacy.
Serial Killer Thriller Since the publication of Thomas Harris’s The
Silence of the Lambs (1988), the serial killer thriller has estab-
lished itself as one of the most popular varieties of the thriller
(although many of these novels could, like the work of Harris,
arguably also be categorised as horror novels: the generic lines
are often blurred). Many present-day serial killer thrillers imitate
the basic plot structure first used by Harris, interweaving chapters
told from the killer’s perspective (which reveal the aberrant psy-
chological compulsions and tormented backstory that have made
him or her into a killer, as well as the planning and execution of
their latest gruesome murder) with chapters focusing on the law
enforcement officers determined to bring the antagonist to jus-
tice. There are also thrillers/horror novels told entirely or mainly
from the perspective of the killer, such as Jim Thompson’s 1952
noir classic The Killer Inside Me, Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959),
John Fowles’s 1963 debut novel The Collector, (a major influence
on Harris), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Jeff
Lindsay’s Dexter series (2004–15). Mark Seltzer has persuasively
suggested that ‘serial murder and its representations have by now
largely replaced the Western as the most popular genre-fiction of
the body and of bodily violence in our culture’ (1998: 1).

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 ‘SAD PUPPIES’ CONTROVERSY  71

Serialisation Until the beginning of the twentieth century, many

popular fiction narratives were published in serial form, usually
weekly or monthly, one chapter (or volume) at a time. It was in an
author’s best commercial interest to string the audience along for
as long as possible: serialised stories therefore often ended with a
dramatic twist or cliff-hanger intended to keep the reader hooked
until the next instalment. As Christopher Lindner notes, ‘we owe
the phenomenon of the serial to Victorian England, where the rise
of mass production, cheap printing, public literacy, professional
authorship and modern advertising created the conditions needed
for launching mass media and the modern periodical’ (2014: X).
Some contemporary authors of popular fiction have also experi-
mented with serialisation. Stephen King initially published his
1996 novel The Green Mile in six parts and would become an
electronic publishing pioneer with his serialised e-book The Plant
(2000). More recently, David Mitchell’s haunted house tale Slade
House (2015) began life as a series of tweets. The immediacy
and accessibility of e-publishing lends itself particularly well to
serialisation, and fanfiction is also often published in a serial
format. Amazon has recently set up the Kindle Serials program,
and Wattpad is organised around the idea that authors should
publish their work in short, regular bursts. Novels have also been
distributed as serialised text messages, particularly in China and
Japan.
‘Serious’ Literature Alternative descriptor for literary fiction, which
implies that whilst this kind of writing carries intellectual weight
and artistic ambition, popular fiction is lightweight and funda-
mentally ‘unserious’.
‘Sad Puppies’ Controversy Dispute related to nominations for the
ballots of the 2015 Hugo Awards for excellence in science fic-
tion. The controversy began with an organised voting campaign
masterminded by politically conservative fans/writers/publishers
who believed that recent voting patterns had reflected a bias on
the part of the organisers towards fiction of a more socially ‘pro-
gressive’ and ‘message driven’ nature. (The name ‘Sad Puppies’
was intended as joking reference to a supposedly mawkish charity
advertisement.) It was also argued that some prominent recent
winners had reflected highbrow ‘literary’ aspirations and left-
wing political leanings rather than true ‘popular taste’. The ‘Sad
Puppies’, and their even more vociferous ‘Rabid Puppies’ allies

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 72  SHARED WORLD/UNIVERSE

flooded the ballot with nominees whose work represented their

own ideas of what science fiction should be like. Ultimately,
Hugo voters overwhelmingly rejected the ‘Sad Puppies’ slate of
nominees, preferring to vote instead for the ‘No Award’ option
in many categories.
Shared World/Universe Fictional universe shaped by the input of more
than one creator/contributor. The term is used in the comic-book
industry to refer to the shared worlds/universes populated by the
heroes and villains who make up the Marvel and DC universes
respectively (Marvel even has a ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ that
ties together its big screen properties). Shared worlds are par-
ticularly common in science fiction and fantasy (see for instance
the ever-expanding Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, or Joss
Whedon’s ‘Buffyverse’).
Shelf-Life The amount of time that a work of popular fiction remains
commercially available and/or culturally prominent.
‘Sick Lit’ Sub-genre of YA that focuses upon a protagonist who has
a serious or life-threatening medical or psychological condition.
Slash Fanfiction term referring to a ‘fic’ (or story) that posits a roman-
tic and/or sexual relationship between characters who were not
involved in the source text. Slash often pairs two (or more) char-
acters of the same sex.
Small-press Publishing Small presses have always been of particu-
lar importance for certain genres and sub-genres. The present-
day prominence of weird fiction author H. P. Lovecraft owes
much to the dedication of Arkham House, for instance, whilst
one of the leading publishers of short-form horror fiction in the
US is Cemetery Dance Publications. Tartarus Press, Valancourt
Books and Swan River Press all specialise in reprinting both new
and classic/neglected supernatural, horror and fantastic fiction.
Bizarro Fiction was first established by the likes of Raw Dog
Screaming Press and Eraserhead Press. Small press publishing
facilitates the distribution, publication and republication of genre
fiction that would otherwise be underserved (or ignored) by the
mainstream publishing industry.
Space Opera When people unfamiliar with SF think of the genre,
it is probably the tropes and visuals of the Space Opera that
come to mind. As noted in The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction,
although the term initially applied to hackneyed and stereotypi-
cal pulp fictions, as the 1940s progressed, it began to ‘be applied

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 STEAMPUNK  73

instead to colourful action adventure stories of interplanetary or

interstellar conflict’ (Clute and Nicholls 1999: 1138). Many of
the most significant SF narratives of the late twentieth century
and early twenty-first century can be described as ‘Space Operas’.
These include Star Wars (1977), the Star Trek (1966–) franchise,
and much of the work of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and
Arthur C. Clarke (and a multitude of other major writers from
the Golden age and after, such as Lois McMaster Bujold, Iain M.
Banks and Peter S. Hamilton). Notable recent examples include
the acclaimed TV series Battlestar Galactica (2004–9) and the
film Interstellar (2014). Ann Leckie’s 2013 novel Ancillary Justice
was widely hailed as a particularly ambitious addition to the
space opera canon. The sub-genre’s fondness for vaguely martial
tales of derring-do, visits to exotic planets, space battles and
spaceships means that it has always lent itself particularly well to
the visual medium.
Speculative Fiction Loosely defined term generally used as an alterna-
tive (albeit controversial) descriptor for science fiction and fan-
tasy (and sometimes non-realist fiction in general). Some writers
and fans associated with the SF genre in particular have suggested
that the term is deployed by writers from a more self-consciously
‘literary’ tradition who wish to publicly distance themselves from
the genre whose conventions they are themselves appropriating.
Although well-known SF authors such as Robert Heinlein and
Samuel Delaney have also used the term in reference to their own
work, it is nowadays perhaps most associated with Margaret
Atwood, who has said that because her works in this vein drama-
tise events that might happen in the future, they are speculative
rather than science fictional (she associates the genre with more
fantastical and overtly outlandish elements).
Steampunk Sub-genre of science fiction usually set in an alternative
version of Victorian Britain in which technological developments
are much more advanced than they were in historical actuality.
Important early works include The Difference Engine by William
Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990) and Infernal Devices by K. W.
Jeter (1987), which, like The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis (2015),
features clockwork automata.
Steampunk has undergone a major pop culture renaissance in
recent years, in part thanks to the rich possibilities it presents for
various forms of cosplay. Female authors have produced many of

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 74  STREET LIT

the most notable recent mass-market steampunk novels, with Gail

Carriger, Lilith Saintcrow and Meljean Brook all having authored
multi-volume series which combine Steampunk with romance
and fantasy elements. Although many, if not most, Steampunk
tales are set in a fictionalised version of Victorian London, there
are some examples set in an alternative version of our own time,
such as The Fall of the Gas Lit Empire series by Rod Duncan
(2014–) (which features a version of Britain that split up into
two very different realms as a result of a successful Luddite rebel-
lion), and titles set in a steampunk version of nineteenth-century
North America, such as Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series
(2009–).
Street Lit Term used in the US to describe gritty, authentic and uncom-
promising stories of life on the streets. The term has mainly been
associated with African-American authors who feel that the lives
of those living in poorer, disenfranchised neighbourhoods have
been ignored by ‘mainstream’ (i.e. white) literary culture. ‘Street
Lit’ authors often use pen-names. The terms ‘Urban Literature’
and ‘Hip-Hop Fiction’ are sometimes also used in reference to
these novels.
Sub-Genre A sub-genre is a recognisable sub-category existing within
a particular genre. Every major popular genre has multiple sub-
genres. The existence of sub-genre is also a way for readers,
publishers and bookshops to further refine and respond to reader
interests. Publishers specialising in one particular genre – e.g.
romance – usually have imprints catering to specific sub-genres
within that umbrella category, such as ‘erotica’, or ‘paranormal
romance’.
Superhero Fiction Whilst the superhero has been a mainstay of the
comic book since the late 1930s, it is only relatively recently that
they have made substantial inroads into prose fiction. The current
popularity of the superhero novel was preceded by Bantam’s long-
running Wild Cards anthology series (which began in 1987, and
was co-edited for many years by George R. R. Martin), set in an
alternative history version of post-World War II Earth in which an
alien virus creates a multitude of superheroes and super-villains.
Although some superhero novels, such as crime author Andrew
Vachss’s Batman: The Ultimate Evil (1995) and Tom De Haven’s
It’s Superman! (2011), are authorised takes on established char-
acters, in recent years quite a few original superhero origin stories

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 SWORD AND SORCERY  75

have been released as novels, many of them affectionately decon-

structing the very conceit of the superhero. These include: Austin
Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible (2007); Kelly Thompson’s
depiction of female superhero who is inextricably linked to her
gleefully insane nemesis in The Girl Who Would be King (2013);
Lavie Tidhar’s decade-spanning The Violent Century (2013),
V. E. Schwab’s Vicious (2013) and Brandon Sanderson’s YA
Steelheart series (2013−16). These novels, like their comic-book
counterparts, tend to focus on themes of power, morality and
social responsibility.
Supermarket Fiction Like the terms airport novel and drugstore
paperback, the term ‘Supermarket Fiction’ refers to mass-mar-
ket paperbacks sold outside of bookstores, in this instance, in
supermarkets/superstores.
Super Thursday Important date for the British publishing industry.
‘Super Thursday’ (usually in mid-October) is when the initial
details of the new titles that will be released in time for the
Christmas buying boom are released.
Suspense ‘Suspense’ is a rather nebulous publishing category that
often crosses over into crime, mystery and even romance, but can
also have elements in common with horror and gothic fiction. As
the name would suggest, suspense novels are primarily supposed
to evoke tension and anticipation in the reader. These kinds of
novels often feature plots in which the protagonist is drawn into
a mystery and faces considerable personal jeopardy. Vicarious
identification with the embattled protagonist’s situation is a key
aspect of such narratives. Like the thriller (a close relative) the
suspense novel is a descendant of sensation fiction. Noël Carroll
usefully notes that it is generally agreed that ‘a key component
of the emotion suspense is a state of cognitive uncertainty.
We feel suspense as the heroine heads for the buzzsaw, in part
because we are uncertain as to whether or not she will be cleaved’
(2013: 71).
Sword and Sorcery Fantasy sub-genre (particularly associated with
the American pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s), which
generally involved sword-wielding protagonists and the use of
magic. The conventions of the Sword and Sorcery tale were estab-
lished by authors such as Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and
C. L. Moore. The sub-genre has arguably since been absorbed
into ‘epic’ or ‘heroic’ fantasy. Sword and Sorcery was however

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 76  TECHNOTHRILLER

a major influence upon the RPG (role playing game) trend of the
1970s and after.

T
Technothriller Thriller characterised by a plot containing rogue or
dangerous technological innovations, often a featuring a device
that has some kind of potentially devastating military application.
Tom Clancy’s 1984 bestseller The Hunt for Red October helped
establish the sub-genre in its current incarnation. His intensely
detailed descriptions of military hardware and equipment par-
ticularly appealed to readers looking for ‘insider information’.
Textual Poaching Term that originates with Michel de Certeau. In
The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) he argues that rather than
just being passive consumers of mass culture, people are in fact
actively engaging the text in question, and even appropriate this
material for their own use and interpretation (2011: 174). In other
words, they are ‘poachers’. This position on mass culture contrasts
with that of thinkers such as Adorno, for whom the popular audi-
ence is a much more passive and malleable entity. The term is also
associated with the fandom scholar Henry Jenkins, who expands
upon de Certeau’s ideas in his book Textual Poachers: Television
Fans and Participatory Culture (1993).
Thrillers see entry in Major Popular Genres section
Trade Paperback Softcover book commercially pitched somewhere
between a hardback and a mass-market paperback. Trade paper-
backs are more expensive, slightly larger and generally of better
quality (and hence more collectable) than the latter, but more
affordable than the former.
Trope Within a popular fiction context, a trope is a standard, familiar
(and occasionally clichéd) story element, setting, theme or plot
device that authors operating within a particular genre charac-
teristically return to again and again. These include the likes
of the haunted house (a staple of horror/supernatural fiction);
the plucky heroine who battles a totalitarian regime (a staple of
recent YA dystopian fiction), the gunslinger (westerns), or the
hard-bitten detective (mystery/noir/crime).
True Crime Non-fiction genre concerned with factual accounts of
real-life criminal acts, both solved and unsolved. True crime as
we understand the term today has its roots in eighteenth-century
publications such as the ‘Newgate Calendar’, which collected

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 TWI-MOM  77

together accounts of the life stories and criminal deeds of prison-

ers awaiting execution in London’s Newgate Prison. Broadsheets,
chapbooks and penny dreadfuls often drew on true crimes, as
did ballads and oral recitations. Popular fiction has long been
inspired by true crimes. The first major American gothic novel,
Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: An American Tale (1798),
was based upon a real-life family massacre that took place in
upstate New York in 1781. Wilkie Collins’s classic sensation
novel The Moonstone (1868) appropriated elements of the infa-
mous 1860 ‘Road Hill House’ child murder, as did the 1862
bestseller Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon,
whilst Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle
(1962) fictionalises aspects of the 1892 Lizzy Borden case. The
crimes of Wisconsin murderer and grave-robber Ed Gein not
only inspired Robert Bloch’s ground-breaking psychological
thriller Psycho (1959), but also influenced The Silence of the
Lambs (1988). Truman Capote claimed to have created an
entirely new genre – the ‘non fiction novel’ in his classic account
of the slaying of a Kansas farm family, In Cold Blood (1966). A
similar approach to a high-profile crime was used by Norman
Mailer in The Executioner’s Song (1979); it was anticipated by
Meyer Levin’s fictionalisation of the ‘Leopold and Loeb’ case in
Compulsion (1956). Anne Rule’s account of her relationship with
Ted Bundy in The Stranger Beside Me (1980) helped establish a
thriving market for mass-market true crime books focusing on the
exploits of serial killers. For obvious reasons, crime novels also
often draw upon real-life incidents. Neo-noir writer James Ellroy
specialises in incorporating actual historical events and figures
into his LA-set crime novels, most famously in The Black Dahlia
(1987). More recently, Gillian Flynn has stated that her domestic
noir mega-hit Gone Girl (2012) was influenced by the media
coverage of high-profile spousal murder cases. Within popular
culture more broadly, the popularity and media attention given
to the first season of the immersive podcast Serial (2015–) and
the TV series The Jinx (2015) and The Making of a Murderer
(2015) underline the fact that true crime is currently experiencing
a major surge of popularity across the media landscape.
Twi-Mom Term applied to the women well above YA age category
who are avid fans of the Twilight series in both book and film
form.

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 78  TWITTERATURE

Twitterature Short fiction published on Twitter social media platform

in bursts of 140 characters or less.

U
Urban Fantasy Sub-genre of fantasy which also contains elements
of horror, action, mystery and, occasionally, noir. As Peter S.
Beagle writes, ‘Urban fantasy counts on familiarity with mythol-
ogy, fairytales, and the earliest horror tropes, like vampires, were-
wolves and warlocks […] as shorthand to pull the reader through
familiar territory quickly without wasting precious time’ (2011:
11). The setting is always a major city (usually one that also
exists in real life) in which all manner of fantastical and super-
natural entities and events exist alongside a more recognisably
mundane ‘real world’. The protagonist is usually a hard-bitten,
cynical, ass-kicking detective figure who is either drawn into this
underworld or already belongs to it. Exotic love interests are a
regular feature, but unlike as in paranormal romance, this is not
the prime focus of narrative interest. Television shows such as
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997−2003), Angel (1999−2004) and
Supernatural (2005–) have been major influences on the contem-
porary urban fantasy.
Utopian Fiction A utopian story is set in an imagined world that
purports to be the ‘ideal’ society, or at least is attempting to be so.
The word ‘utopia’ (coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More) is derived
from the Greek for both ‘no place’ and ‘good place’ and stands
as one of the earliest and most common forms of proto-science
fiction. Like its grim twin, the Dystopian story, the utopian tale
is usually a platform for the author to express their own political
and philosophical beliefs and predictions, in order to dramatise
their own vision of societal perfection. Although dystopian fic-
tions are much more common in contemporary popular culture,
both the Star Trek universe and Iain M. Banks Culture novels
represent striking visions of a utopian future. Dave Egger’s 2013
novel The Circle is a satirical and timely take on the common ‘this
supposedly utopian society is actually quite dystopian’ narrative
trope.

V
Video Games As electronic gaming has become accepted as an ever
more technologically sophisticated facet of popular culture,

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 WEIRD FICTION/THE WEIRD TALE  79

video game narratives have become richer and more immersive.

The idea of genre within video games is very different from the
concept as it exists in fiction, in that here, generic categories
describe particular types of gameplay and game structure (such
as ‘MMORPG’ [massively multiplayer online role-playing game],
‘First Person Shooter’ and ‘Platformer’). Nevertheless, games
makers have created many titles that belong to recognisable pop-
ular fiction genres, in particular horror, science fiction, adventure
and mystery. Gaming culture has also inspired a number of works
of popular fiction, including Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One
(2011) and Armada (2015), as well as novels based on popular
games series such as Halo, Metal Gear Solid and Assassin’s Creed.

W
Wattpad Online publishing platform, established in 2006, that
describes itself as ‘the world’s largest community of readers and
writers’. It hosts free-to-access stories related to every conceiv-
able genre, sub-genre and variety of fanfiction. Writers – by and
large amateurs – create an online profile linked to the site, and
then amass followers by engaging with fans in the comments
sections, promoting their work online through social media, and
regularly adding new work. Writers are encouraged to provide
their followers with new chapters on a regular, serialised basis.
Chapters are often quite short, presented as unpolished or even
initial drafts, and end on cliff-hangers in order to whet the read-
er’s appetite for further instalments. Some Wattpad authors, such
as One Direction fanfiction author Anna Todd, have amassed
followings so sizable that they have subsequently been signed up
by major (offline) publishers. Wattpad is a particularly popular
online publication medium for teenagers and young women.
Web Fiction Fiction written for initial or sole publication online,
either for self-publishing platforms such as Wattpad and Kindle
Direct, personal blogs, Livejournal, or sites such as CreepyPasta.
com and fanfiction forums.
Web Serial Work of serialised fiction initially made available online
only.
Weird Fiction/The Weird Tale A hybrid generic term that is primar-
ily associated with the work of a specific set of authors that
emerged from the American pulp magazines of the 1930s and
1940s, in particular, Weird Tales. Weird fiction can be loosely

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 80  THE WESTERN

defined as fiction that combines elements from horror, fantasy

and science fiction, although, as S. T. Joshi argues, ‘no definition
of the weird tale embraces all types of works that can plausibly
be assumed to enter into the scope of the term’ (1990: 2). What is
agreed upon is that one of weird fiction’s major authors is H. P.
Lovecraft (whose 1927 essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’
is a key theoretical rumination on ‘the weird tradition’). In their
2011 anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark
Stories, Jeff and Anne VanderMeer argue that in order to qualify
as truly ‘weird’ a tale must fundamentally be about our relation-
ship with what we know as reality.
The Western The Western emerged from the dime novels and pulp
magazines of mid−late nineteenth-century America. From roughly
the beginning of the twentieth century until the late 1960s, the
Western was one of the major popular genres, dominating popu-
lar fiction, television and cinema. As Stephen Matterson observes,

The Western is, broadly, any literary work set on the frontier that
involves conflicts between groups over the future ownership or usage
of the land [. . .] Westerns also frequently explore the nature of indi-
vidual heroism and of manliness, with the frontier being recognised as
a space where manhood can be fully expressed beyond the domesticat-
ing influence of women. (2003: 236)

Authors associated with the ‘Golden Age’ of the Western include

Owen Wister (author of The Virginian [1902], which is cited by
John Cawelti as the beginning of the modern western), Louis
L’Amour and Zane Grey. More recently, Larry McMurtry and
Cormac McCarthy have written elegiac and revisionist narratives
in this vein.
‘Women in Refrigerators’ Phrase coined by comic book writer Gail
Simone in response to an infamous 1994 issue of Green Lantern
in which the male protagonist’s girlfriend was murdered and
shoved into the aforementioned domestic appliance. Simone and
a number of other figures working in the comics industry set up
an influential website of the same name dedicated to highlighting
the frequency with which the abuse, threats and murder of female
characters were used against male protagonists. Their wider mis-
sion was to encourage the creation of female characters who are
well rounded characters in their own right and exist for reasons

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 YOUNG ADULT FICTION (YA)  81

other than to be used as a weapon against the male hero (or

‘fridged’).
Women’s Fiction Controversial term used to refer to certain types
of popular fiction written by female authors and read by a pre-
dominantly female audience. Some authors have rejected the label
because they see it as a way of downplaying the importance of
female-authored texts and dismissing their treatment of subjects
such as domestic life, intimate relationships and marriage. It has
been argued that the term feeds into the condescending percep-
tion that whilst male authors write ‘big’, ambitious novels about
‘weighty’ topics, women write on a small scale about ‘women’s
issues’. The ‘Women’s Fiction’ chapter of the RWA (Romance
Writers of America) however defines it as ‘as a commercial
novel about a woman on the brink of life change and personal
growth. Her journey details emotional reflection and action that
transforms her and her relationships with others, and includes
a hopeful/upbeat ending with regard to her romantic relation-
ship’, although their placement under the umbrella of ‘romance’
fiction arguably means that these novels are more likely to have
a conventionally ‘happy’ conclusion. In contrast, whilst Jodi
Picoult also identifies herself as a writer of ‘Women’s Fiction’,
her books typically deal with morally complex and even taboo
subjects, such as the ethics of conceiving a child so that they can
act as a ‘saviour sibling’ (My Sister’s Keeper, 2004); the after-
math of a high-school shooting (Nineteen Minutes, 2007) and the
Holocaust (The Storyteller, 2013).
World-Building Process by which an author creates a fully realised
and immersive fictional universe. World-building is considered
particularly important in genres which often are set in secondary
worlds, such as fantasy and science fiction, although it arguably
occurs in any work of fiction.

Y
Young Adult Fiction (YA) Broadly defined commercial publishing
category that emerged in the US in the late 1960s. The term
‘Young Adult’ is generally used to describe fiction targeted at
readers aged between roughly 12 and 20, although since 2000
it has become clear that many of the most vociferous readers
of YA are much older. The 1967 publication of S. E. Hinton’s
troubled-teen novel The Outsiders is generally cited as one of

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 82  ZOMBIE LIT

the starting points for YA as a distinct publishing category (Hill

2013: 1). A work of YA fiction can conceivably belong to any
popular Genre. There are also sub-genres specifically associated
with YA, such as ‘sick lit’ (epitomised by John Green’s bestseller
The Fault in Our Stars (2012), although novels featuring seri-
ously ill teen protagonists were popular even in the 1980s) and,
more recently, ‘Real-Life’ YA, which represents a move away
from the fantasy and dystopian trend and towards conflicts and
issues of a more everyday, ‘real world’ kind. YA fiction is now
one of the most commercially dominant varieties of popular fic-
tion, and film and TV adaptations of such texts have also become
increasingly significant.

Z
Zombie Lit Sub-genre of horror/apocalyptic fiction set in a world
in which a zombie outbreak has devastated humanity. Literary
depictions of the modern, post Night of the Living Dead (1968)
zombie were, with the exceptions of stories featured in a few
notable anthologies (such as John Skipp and Craig Spector’s
Book of the Dead [1989]), quite rare until post-2000. However,
the ‘mainstreaming’ of the zombie which followed the success
of the Resident Evil (1996–) videogame series, the ‘oral history’
World War Z (2006) and the comic book/TV series The Walking
Dead (2003–) means that the living dead have now shuffled into
the realms of popular fiction as well, thanks to authors such as
David Moody, David Wellington, Mira Grant, M. R. Carey and
Alden Bell. In a further example of the so-called genrefication of
US literary fiction, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) was
favourably received by both critics and readers. The main themes
of zombie lit include the quest to rebuild a functioning society,
the psychological and moral cost of surviving in a world without
order or safety, and questions about whether or not humanity
even deserves to continue. The greatest threat usually comes from
the stupidity, insanity and avarice of other survivors, rather than
from the undead. All zombie lit owes a massive debt to the work
of writer/director George A. Romero, whose ‘Living Dead’ films
created our conception of the modern zombie narrative.

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 Key Critical Approaches

Key Critical and Theoretical

Approaches to Popular Fiction
The following section is intended to provide a concise introduction to
nine key and emerging critical and theoretical approaches to popular
fiction. It also provides a broad overview of the historical develop-
ment of academic approaches to the subject. The entries that follow
are not intended to serve as exhaustive or definitive discussions of
the academic perspectives under discussion. Rather, they represent
an accessible starting point for more advanced critical reading and
study, and will also only discuss specific critical approaches in relation
to how they have been applied to representative examples of popular
fiction, not literature in general.

1. Liberal Humanism and the Cambridge English School

Proponents of literary studies during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries were very conscious of claims that the subject did
not represent a fitting topic for rigorous academic study. As a result,
there was a need to justify the enduring importance of literature and
to support the case that it was as valid a subject of serious intellectual
inquiry as mathematics, philosophy or the sciences. The first major
movement within literary studies was therefore what John Storey calls
the ‘culture and civilisation tradition’, which tended to take a very
moralistic and human-centred view of literature (2009: 18). The idea
was that the study of what was classified as ‘good’ literature not only
made one a better person on an individual level, it also helped create
a defence against the dehumanising and even chaotic forces of moder-
nity. Accompanying this sense of moral and intellectual mission was a
correspondingly narrow view of what literature is, and how it should
best be studied. Needless to say, works that we would now classify as
‘popular fiction’ were, in a sign of things to come for many decades
after, not usually considered either as ‘good’ or as proper ‘literature’.
What would become known as the liberal humanist approach was

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 84  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

greatly influenced by the work of poet and critic Matthew Arnold,

who in Culture and Anarchy (1867–9) famously characterised culture
as ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (2006:
5). Writing at a time of considerable social, economic and political
change for the United Kingdom, Arnold saw culture as a balm for
an increasingly chaotic and even morally diseased age dominated by
‘machinery’. He also believed that culture was of particular impor-
tance in terms of how it could positively influence the ever-expanding
ranks of the middle classes (2006: 55).
Arnold’s writings had an important influence upon the so-called
‘Cambridge English School’ of the 1920s. Of particular interest to the
student of popular fiction is the work of husband and wife team F. R.
(Frank) and Q. D. (Queenie, née Roth) Leavis. For the Leavises, there
was no doubt that the study of literature made one a better human
being. ‘High’ culture in general and ‘good’ literature in particular were
seen as the last lines of defence for a civilisation in possibly terminal
decline. Particularly important is F. R. Leavis’s 1930 pamphlet ‘Mass
Civilisation and Minority Culture’, in which he argues that only an
educated minority can discerningly appreciate art and literature, and
are capable of ‘unprompted, first-hand judgement’ (2011: 143). This
minority is extremely important, he continues, because upon them
depends ‘our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the
past’ (2011: 144). This intellectual elite not only create the evalua-
tive standards by which culture can be appraised but also uphold the
moral and philosophical ideals that ‘order the finer living of the age’
(2011: 144).
F. R. Leavis’s belief that culture was in a state of unprecedented
crisis is one that we see echoed again and again in much subsequent
critical writing on the relationship between ‘mass’ and ‘high’ culture.
So too was his contention that culture was at that time under major
threat from mass production, standardisation and a process of ‘level-
ling down’ (2011: 147). Indeed, as we shall see, precisely this kind
of terminology arises over and over again in the work of critics and
commentators for whom the ‘harmful’ effects of ‘mass’ culture is a
given. Like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer a few years later,
F. R. Leavis singled out the then relatively new medium of film for
sustained critique (Pease 2011: 203). Both film and radio, he argued,
negatively impact upon the ability of the individual to know and to
effectively use their own minds due to their reliance upon the creation
of cheap emotional response rather than genuine emotional or intel-

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 KEY CRITICAL APPROACHES  85

lectual engagement. As Alison Pease notes, in F. R. Leavis’s characteri-

sation, ‘the typical consumer of mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s
was understood to be an emotionally stunted, passive receptacle with
an endless capacity to be filled with cheap, repetitive media’ (2011:
203). Indeed, the mass audience, in his reading, is so overwhelmed by
the sheer range of bewildering signals that, as Leavis puts it, ‘unless
he is especially gifted or especially favoured, he can hardly begin to
discriminate. Here we have the plight of culture in general. The land-
marks have shifted, multiplied and crowded upon one another, the
distinctions and dividing lines have blurred away, the boundaries are
gone’. Faced with what he suggestively calls ‘a smother of new books’,
only a very small proportion of the general public – the masses – is
realistically able to cope (2011: 159). Interestingly, Leavis uses an
example specifically related to the growth of popular fiction – the
American Book-of-the-Month club – as an example of the fact that
the reader these days now needs to be spoon-fed from a selection of
pre-selected tomes.
F. R. Leavis remains one of the most significant literary critics of the
twentieth century, and is also well known for his idiosyncratic take on
the development of the English novel in The Great Tradition (1948).
Just as important is the work of his wife Q. D. Leavis, whose pioneer-
ing study Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) represents one of the
earliest academic attempts to scrutinise popular fiction. It is also, as
David Ayers notes, ‘a polemical work which aims to rally the cultured
“minority”, a group which she regrets is now to be distinguished from
the powerful minority since “the people with power no longer repre-
sent intellectual authority and culture”’ (Ayers 2004: 117).
Q. D. Leavis upheld fundamental Leavisite values such as the belief
that there existed a (sadly past) ‘Golden Age’ during which the bal-
ance between an enlightened mass readership and uplifting and sig-
nificant forms of literature was just about right. Utilising what she
called an ‘anthropological’ method of investigation (which included
sending questionnaires to sixty of the most successful contemporary
best-selling authors, twenty-five of whom responded), Q. D. Leavis’s
deployment of historical context and discussion of the commercial
conditions that help shape popular reading habits in both the past
and present was extremely influential, even if, as John Docker notes,
she makes it clear from the outset that she does not believe that popu-
lar fiction warrants the kind of close reading that ‘proper’ literature
deserves (1994: 24).

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 86  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

Q. D. Leavis argued that innovations such as cheap circulating

libraries and magazines specialising in popular fiction had accustomed
the British public to a certain kind of undemanding, escapist reading
material which left them completely unprepared (and unwilling) to
engage with the tragically neglected ‘good’ literature of the age. In
what would become an often-replicated characterisation, the afford-
able thrillers that were particularly popular at the time were described
as a ‘form of drug habit’ (1979: 22) that appealed to the average reader
because they ‘excite an emotional activity for which there is no scope
in his life’ (1979: 63). She further suggested that fiction by authors
such as the famous late Victorian popular writers Marie Corelli and
Hall Caine ‘actually get in the way of genuine feeling and responsible
thinking by creating cheap mechanical responses and by throwing
their weight on the side of social, national and herd prejudices. The
most popular contemporary fiction, it has been shown, unfits its read-
ers for any novel that demands readjustment’ (1979: 70). For Q. D.
Leavis, then, the new commercial conditions that emerged during the
Victorian era marked the tragic ‘beginning of a split between popular
and cultivated taste’ which was, she believed, only accelerating in her
own time.
As Christine Berberich observes, whilst the work of the Leavises
helped create and indeed reinforce the division of literature into ‘high-
brow’ and ‘lowbrow’ that still endures in some quarters to this day,

it could, however, also be argued that the Leavises’ critique of popular fic-
tion and culture simultaneously, and seemingly incongruously, elevated its
status to a subject suddenly worthy of culture and debate. Without Q. D.
and F. R. Leavis, a book specifically on ‘popular’ literature (as compared
to other literatures) might never even have seen the present day. (2015: 39)

As such, their influence on the development of the academic study

of popular literature remains considerable, even if both of them found
mass culture to be quite problematic in terms of what they perceived
to be its harmful impact upon the intellectual faculties of the ‘ordinary’
reader as well as its (supposedly) detrimental wider cultural effects.

Bibliography
Arnold, Matthew [1869] (2006), Culture and Anarchy, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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 KEY CRITICAL APPROACHES  87

Ayers, David (2004), English Literature of the 1920s, Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.
Berberich, Christine (2015), ‘Twentieth-Century Popular: History, Theory
and Context’, in C. Berberich (ed.), The Bloomsbury Introduction to
Popular Fiction, London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 30–52.
Docker, John (1994), ‘Modernism Versus Popular Literature’, in
Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 24–35.
Leavis, F. R. [1930] (2011), ‘Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture’, in
Education and the University: A Sketch for an English School, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 141–71.
Leavis. Q. D. [1932] (1979), Fiction and the Reading Public, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Pease, Alison (2011), ‘Modernism and Mass Culture’, in M. Levenson
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 197–211.
Robertson, P. J. M. (1988), The Leavises on Fiction, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Singh, G. (1995), F. R. Leavis: A Literary Biography, London: Duckworth.
Storey, John (2009), ‘The “Culture and Civilisation” Tradition’, in Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, London: Pearson and
Longman, pp. 17–35.

2. The Frankfurt School

The next theoretical intervention of major relevance to the field of
popular fiction studies came about due to the emergence of the so-
called Frankfurt School, a group of immensely important intellectuals
who were based at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt,
Germany, between the early 1920s and the 1940s. Of particular
importance here is the work of Theodor Adorno. Although his writ-
ings on ‘mass culture’ tended to focus specifically on radio, music, the
cinema and advertising, many of the concepts he coined (both alone,
and in tandem with his colleague Max Horkheimer) have become
critical touchstones for scholars interested in the intellectual response
to popular fiction during the twentieth century and after. As J. M.
Bernstein observes,

For Adorno, the Marxist belief that capitalist forces of production will
generate a free society is illusory. Capital does not possess such immedi-
ately emancipatory forces or elements; the drift of capitalist development,
even the underlying or implicit drift of such development, is not towards
freedom but towards further integration and domination. (Adorno 2010: 1)

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 88  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

‘Mass culture’, in the formulation of Adorno and Horkheimer, rein-

forces rather than challenges the status quo of this capitalist, post-
industrial society.
A key plank of this theoretical approach was the idea of the so-called
‘culture industry’, which, as Adorno further elaborated in his 1975
essay ‘The Culture Industry Reconsidered’, ‘transfers the profit motive
naked on to cultural forms’ (2010: 99), and forces together high and
low culture, thereby destroying the seriousness of high art and snuffing
out any potential for resistance within lower art in order to maintain
social control (2010: 98). The culture industry, he continues, ‘misuses
its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen
their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable’ (2010:
99). Adorno makes it clear that he did not intend his use of the word
‘industry’ to be taken entirely literally, but that it instead refers to ‘the
standardisation of the thing itself – such as that of the Western, familiar
to every movie-goer – and to the rationalisation of distribution tech-
niques, but not strictly to the production process’ (2010: 100).
In their 1944 essay (revised 1947) ‘The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, Adorno and Horkheimer argued
that culture in its current state was characterised by homogeneity and
uniformity, in part because

the people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly:

as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio
no longer need to pretend to be art. The truth is that they are just business
made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately
produce. (2002: 1)

The ruthless process of standardisation they identified in the ‘Culture

Industry’ is merely a precursor or parallel to the same processes on a
wider societal level, such as in, for instance, politics. Categories within
popular entertainment such as magazine stories are said to relate not
so much to the subject matter as to classifying consumers: in their omi-
nous phrase, ‘Something is provided for all so that none may escape’
(2002: 2). Paradoxically, therefore, the more choice the public appears
to have within their range of mass-produced entertainment products,
the less freedom he or she actually enjoys: even the varying quality
provided for is really about making sure that all sectors of society,
from the intellectual elite to the uneducated worker, feel that they have
been catered for.

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 KEY CRITICAL APPROACHES  89

In the analysis offered here, the wide range of genres provided for
by the commercial producers of popular fiction (the publishers) is in
fact, largely irrelevant, in that all of these books, regardless of their
ostensible differences, are actually standardised, homogenised prod-
ucts created by the same culture industry. Adorno and Horkheimer
use the specific example of going to the cinema to see a film that we
know the end of even as it begins, but they might just as well have
been referring to the predictability and use of formula within popular
fiction. Everything has been so carefully ‘stamped with sameness’ that
true authenticity or art becomes impossible. The mass audience here is
figured as a collective of ‘helpless victims’ so deceived and conditioned
by the powers that be that they in fact become complicit in the system
that seeks to control them. In another memorable phrase, we are told
that, ‘they insist upon the very ideology which enslaves them’ (2002:
8). ‘Leisure time’ is seen as merely an extension of work intended to
ready the worker for yet more thankless work. There is no real choice,
only the seductive illusion of choice, and ‘a constant reproduction of
the same thing’ (2002: 8).
In his essay ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’ (1991), Adorno further
outlined what he saw as the true nature of the culture industry, which
results in the replacement of imagination by a ‘mechanically relentless
control mechanism’, erodes real conflict, and has the ‘ritual conclu-
sion’ of the happy ending (2010: 64). In relation to popular fiction, he
observes of the

socio critical novels which are fed though the bestseller mechanism, we
can no longer distinguish how far the horrors narrated in them serve the
denunciation of society as opposed to the amusement of those who do not
yet have the Roman circuses they are really waiting for. (2010: 68)

Mass culture is pre-determined, pre-patterned and pre-digested; and

people willingly go along with it because they know that it provides
the ‘mores they will surely need as their passport to a monopolised
life’ (2010: 92). ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’ concludes with a typi-
cally dystopian assertion that mass culture potentially even possesses
the means to help create the conditions in which fascism may flourish;
in part because it dehumanises people through a process known as
‘reification’, which imposes signs from above, and not from within
or below – and is essentially, according to this reading, a nightmare
that we all willingly participate in (2010: 95). However, it is also

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 90  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

i­ mportant, as Ross Wilson observes, to bear in mind that Adorno does

not necessarily see cultural products as being bad in and of themselves.
Instead, ‘What Adorno objects to in contemporary culture is precisely
the failure of cultural products to fulfil their own potential. That
failure is a consequence of the fact that potential is sacrificed because
everything must be fit into existing moulds’ (Wilson 2007: 42).
As John Storey (2009) notes, the work of Adorno’s fellow Frankfurt
School thinker Walter Benjamin, and in particular, his famous 1936
essay ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
provides a more hopeful reading of the masses not as passive consum-
ers, but as individuals with the capacity to actively engage with and
appropriate mass culture for personal, political and even potentially
subversive ends. Though he was also mainly discussing film, photogra-
phy and art, Benjamin observed that mass literacy and advanced print
culture had brought about a massive transformation in the relation-
ship between writer and reader, and even suggested that the distinc-
tion between author and public was about to lose its basic character
(1999: 225). Even though he was obviously writing long before the
advent of the digital age, Benjamin’s discussion of the ways in which
technological advances can transform not just our relationship with
art, but cultural products in general, is still immensely relevant.

Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. [1991] (2010), ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’, in The
Culture Industry: Essays on Mass Culture, London: Routledge, pp. 61–98.
Adorno, Theodor W. [1975] (2010), ‘The Culture Industry Reconsidered’,
in The Culture Industry: Essays on Mass Culture, London: Routledge, pp.
98–107.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer [1944] (2002), ‘The Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 94–136.
Benjamin, Walter [1936] (1999), ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’, in Illuminations, London: Pimlico, 1999, pp. 211–14.
Storey, John (2009), ‘The Frankfurt School’, in Cultural Theory and Popular
Culture: An Introduction, London: Pearson and Longman, pp. 62–70.
Wilson, Ross (2007), Theodor Adorno: Routledge Critical Thinkers, London:
Routledge.

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3. Structuralism and Popular Fiction

The structuralist fascination with the underlying organisation of texts
has meant that popular fiction, often considered to be a particularly
formulaic, predictable form of literature, has for many critics repre-
sented an attractive and indeed obvious subject for this kind of scru-
tiny. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, critics began applying
theoretical insights derived from the structuralist approach to lan-
guage and reality to culture at large. For instance, French anthro-
pologist Claude Levi-Strauss used structuralist methods to analyse
the rituals, taboos and myths of ‘primitive’ cultures. Another leading
French theorist, Roland Barthes, applied the structuralist method to
1950s French culture in his essay collection Mythologies (1957), in
order to tease out the hidden assumptions and ideological structures
which he saw as underlining (and indeed, creating) our perceptions of
the world.
One of the most famous early structuralist readings of a popular fic-
tion narrative is Italian author and critic Umberto Eco’s analysis of the
James Bond novels in his 1965 essay ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’.
In it, he describes the way in which the first novel in the series, Casino
Royale (1953), establishes ‘all the elements for the building a machine
that functions basically on a set of precise units governed by rigorous
combinational rules’ (Eco 1965: 159). Eco broke the novel down into
nine specific ‘moves’ arranged according to a ‘perfectly pre-arranged
scheme’, arguing that although there were often inversions and varia-
tions in the novels that followed, the same basic elements were present
in every novel, albeit not necessarily in the same order every time.
Eco would later write on ‘The Myth of Superman’ (1972), in which
the Man of Steel’s relationship to his mythological predecessors was
discussed alongside an astute analysis of the narrative structure of the
typical Superman comic. In the essay collection, The Sign of Three:
Dupin, Holmes, Pierce (1983), which Eco edited along with Thomas
A. Sebeok, contributors detailed undertook semiotic readings of clas-
sic crime fiction, and in doing so, provided an even more detailed
reading of the ‘system of signs’ they saw as underpinning a specific
popular genre.
The collection also provides further evidence that crime is prob-
ably the genre that has been examined most often (and certainly most
famously) from a structuralist perspective. The intellectual ‘puzzle’
aspect of ‘Golden Age’ (1920s–1950s) detective fiction had indeed

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rendered the genre a semi-respectable subject of scholarly inquiry long

before horror, romance or science fiction texts made their way onto
university reading lists. The seemingly clear-cut nature of the genre’s
basic narrative structure – a crime is committed and then investigated
– also makes it a particularly attractive subject for this kind of formal-
ist analysis. Leading structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov even outlined
an influential ‘Typology of Detective Fiction’ in his book The Poetics
of Prose (1966; 1977, in translation). Drawing upon the work of the
Russian formalists, Todorov argued that there were three specific
types of detective fiction: the thriller, the whodunit and the suspense
story (he also saw the thriller as being a kind of detective story).
Todorov believed that each detective story can in fact be understood
as two specific stories, the ‘whodunit’ and ‘the investigation’, but
that depending on which sub-type one is dealing with, these elements
are rearranged. As Todorov’s findings underlined, the structuralist
approach can be particularly useful for critics looking to draw broad
conclusions about a particular genre. It is for this reason that in the
two most important critical studies to date of the romance genre,
Janice A. Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) and Pamela Regis’s
A Natural History of the Romance (1996), we can see strong traces of
the structuralist influence in the chapters in which each author seeks
to define the specific narrative structures of the genre.
Based as it is on a quasi-scientific methodology (diagrams, charts
and tables of various sorts are not at all uncommon in structuralist
readings), structuralism was also attractive to critics during the early
years of popular fiction studies, because the approach provides such
an obviously rational, methodical framework for approaching ‘non-
canonical’ texts. Whilst it has long since been supplemented by a wide
range of alternative theoretical approaches, structuralism therefore
still furnishes a useful theoretical footing for critics who intend to
embark upon an in-depth analysis of formulaic elements pertaining
to a genre, or an individual work of fiction, as well as those consider-
ing an individual text or author’s relationship to wider generic and
societal structures.

Bibliography
Barthes, Roland [1957] (2009), Mythologies, London: Vintage.
Eco, Umberto (1972), ‘The Myth of Superman’, Diacritics, vol. 2, no. 1
(Spring), pp. 14–22.

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 KEY CRITICAL APPROACHES  93

Eco, Umberto [1965] (1984), ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’, in The Role of

the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, pp. 144−75.
Hawkes, Terence [1977] (2003), Structuralism and Semiotics, London:
Routledge.
McCracken, Scott (1998), ‘Detective Fiction’, in Pulp: Reading Popular
Fiction, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 50–74.
Radway, Janice A. (1984), Reading the Romance: A Natural History of the
Romance Novel, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Regis, Pamela [1996] (2002), A Natural History of the Romance Novel,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Todorov, Tzvetan [1966] (1977), ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, in The
Poetics of Prose, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 42–52.

4. The Sociological Approach: Marxism, Cultural Materialism and

Cultural Studies
Sociological approaches to literature are grounded in the conviction
that the most insightful means of analysing a text is to consider it
in relation to the economic, social, political and cultural contexts
from which it has emerged. Because popular fiction has always been
associated with issues of commercial production, distribution and
mass appeal (even though to suggest that texts which have been cat-
egorised as ‘literary’ as opposed to ‘popular’ are somehow magically
protected from these kinds of influences would be entirely inaccurate),
it is hardly surprising that theoretical approaches to popular texts are
often rooted in this perspective. As the work of the Frankfurt School
underlined, narratives considered to be products of what some crit-
ics call ‘mass culture’ lend themselves particularly well to modes of
analysis focusing on the links between popular culture, economics,
political ideology and social control. The theoretical approach taken
by Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Benjamin owed a great deal to
Marxism, and indeed, many of their most useful concepts and critical
terms were directly derived from the work of Marx and Engels. As
is the case with the sociological approach more generally, however,
although there are many important critiques of popular culture influ-
enced by this theoretical perspective, popular fiction specifically is not
a particularly common focal point, unless it is within the context of
discussion of certain key genres, as we shall see. Indeed, Marxism is
mentioned only in passing in all of the most significant introductions
and companions to popular fiction published since the late 1990s, and

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even then, it is almost always cited in relation to its influence upon the
Frankfurt School.
One of the few specific considerations of the relationship between
Marxist theory and popular fiction is Tony Bennett’s 1981 essay
‘Marxism and Popular Fiction’. Bennett (who also includes film and
TV in his definition of ‘popular fiction’) argues that popular fiction is
defined within literary criticism as being that which is ‘not literature’
and so is therefore conceptualised in negative terms (in relation to
what it is not, rather than what it is). He suggests that the Marxist
neglect of popular fiction is indicative of a more general weakness
within the Marxist literary project, and claims that Marxist critics,
with the expectation of the Frankfurt School and the key cultural stud-
ies figure Raymond Williams (who we will come to in a moment), have
replicated the value-based canonical judgements inherent in ‘bour-
geois’ criticism, thereby duplicating its assumptions and exclusions
(2003: 241).
Some popular genres have, however, been usefully looked at from
a Marxist perspective, with one of the most frequent being science
fiction. As neo-Marxist critic Frederic Jameson has argued, the desire
to change or to challenge the status quo is a central tenet of Marxism,
whilst the SF genre has the imaginative scope to conjure up empirically
grounded alternatives to society as we find it today (Tally 2013: 35).
The Marxist approach remains an important one in SF criticism to this
day, as chapters in the likes of The Cambridge Companion to Science
Fiction (2003) and Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (2009)
underline.
Marxist economist Ernest Mandel’s Delightful Murder: A Social
History of the Crime Story (1984) attempted to contextualise the
emergence and development of the crime genre as a response to the
wider structural changes in the organisation of ‘bourgeois’ society.
In a response to anyone who might find it ‘frivolous’ for a Marxist
to analyse popular fiction, Mandel persuasively countered by arguing
that historical materialism should be applied to all social phenomena,
and that none was by nature less worthy of study than others (1984:
viii). Gothic studies has been influenced by insights derived from
Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994), which helped give rise
to the critical arena of ‘hauntology’, which is influenced by the fact
that Marx often deployed a distinctly ‘gothic’ vocabulary of ‘ghosts,
vampires and walking corpses’ in his writing (Warwick 2013: 372).
Marxist analysis was a major influence on the theoretical approach

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to mass culture formulated by the so-called ‘cultural materialists’.

The work of British academic Raymond Williams is of considerable
significance here. Within cultural materialism, history is seen as a
matter of subjective interpretation rather than eternal fact, and it is
argued that special attention needs to be paid to overlooked, mar-
ginalised and suppressed voices within a particular culture (Makaryk
1993: 23). Along with Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall
and Paddy Whannel, Williams was a key figure both in the develop-
ment of cultural studies as a distinct area of academic interest in the
UK, and in the creation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies at the University of Birmingham, established in 1964 (hence
the term, ‘The Birmingham School’). Williams’s take on the relation-
ship between literary fiction and popular fiction is usefully outlined by
Jon Thompson (1993). He observes that Williams’s wider critique of
traditional positions pertaining to the supposed divide between ‘high’
and ‘low’ culture means that definitions of what does and does not
constitute ‘literature’ are relative, subjective positions, and that the
exclusion of popular fiction from the canon based on such assump-
tions is a function of ideology rather than any kind of fixed truth
(1993: 80). In other words, the kind of rigid barrier between ‘high’
and ‘low’ culture favoured by the likes of the Leavises is no longer seen
as feasible or appropriate.
One of the most significant publications to emerge from those asso-
ciated with the Birmingham School from a popular fiction perspective
was The Popular Arts (1964) by Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel,
which included chapters on Raymond Chandler, Micky Spillane and
Ian Fleming, as well as sections on the thriller and romance fiction.
Hall and Whannel distinguished between what they called ‘popular
art’, which they said ‘exists through the medium of a personal style’
and they saw as a positive manifestation of culture created by and for
the people, and ‘mass art’, which ‘often destroys all trace of individua-
tion and idiosyncrasy which makes a work compelling and living, and
assumes a sort of de-personalised quality, a no-style’ (1966: 68). For
instance, in an assertion that recalls similar opinions expressed by Q.
D. Leavis, the contemporary romance novel is here associated with the
danger ‘not that they make us feel too strongly and deeply, but that
they confine our very notions of love within their conventional frame-
work, and thus prevent us from feeling strongly and deeply enough’
(1966: 195).
Because their book was also intended as a practical guide for the

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teaching of popular culture, the authors advocated training young

people in the kind of subtle ‘discrimination’ that would allow them
to differentiate between ‘popular art’ and this formulaic and ‘machine
produced’ mass art (1966: 37). As Daniel Horowitz notes however,
whilst Hall and Whannel draw from Matthew Arnold and the Leavises
‘a commitment to use discrimination and judgement in order to ana-
lyse popular culture [. . .] in their hands, discrimination was not, as it
was for the Leavisites, a tool to criticise debased popular culture, but
rather to challenge the widely accepted boundaries of high/low and
good/bad that dominated the discussion of culture’ (2012: 261–2).
The Popular Arts therefore remains one of the most significant early
attempts to outline a distinct pedagogical approach to the critical
study and evaluation of popular culture, including popular fiction.
Another theorist whose insights into the material aspects and
social conditions of popular culture were informed by Marxism was
the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose consideration of the
relationship between cultural preferences (or ‘taste’) and social class
remains significant. Bourdieu’s formulation of terms such as ‘field’,
‘habitus’ and his notion of so-called ‘Cultural Capital’ (the form of
acquired knowledge which comes from the education we receive
within our family, as well as the wider social and institutional educa-
tion which permits us to appreciate and engage with specific cultural
products) was extremely influential. In Distinction: A Social Critique
of the Judgement of Taste (1977), Bourdieu outlined the multitude
of social factors that play their part in informing the aesthetic and
cultural tastes of the individual. As he put it, ‘taste classifies, and it
classifies the classifier’ (1999: 6). As Scott McCracken notes in his dis-
cussion of Bourdieu’s significance to the study of popular fiction, this
focus upon the consumer is important because it suggests that the way
in which we read popular fiction is a result of our social circumstances
(including our gender and class) and also posits that new kinds of taste
can be produced by new social classes (1998: 38).

Bibliography
Bennett, Tony [1981] (2003), ‘Marxism and Popular Fiction’, in P. Humm,
P. Stigant and P. Widdowson (eds), Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature
and History, London: Routledge, pp. 237–65.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1999), Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgement of
Taste, London: Routledge.

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 KEY CRITICAL APPROACHES  97

Fowler, Bridget (1977), ‘Bourdieu, the Popular and the Periphery’, in Pierre
Bourdieu and Critical Theory: Critical Investigations, London: Sage, pp.
160–73.
Hall, Stuart and Paddy Whannel (1964), The Popular Arts, London:
Hutchinson Educational, pp. 142–64.
Horowitz, Daniel (2012), Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular
Culture in the Post War World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Johnson, Randal (1993), ‘Introduction’ to P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural
Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.
1–28.
McCracken, Scott (1998), Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction, Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press.
Makaryk, Rima Irene (ed.) (1993), Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Literary
Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Mandel, Ernest (1984), Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime
Story, London: Pluto Press.
Tally, Robert T. Jr (2013), Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space,
Representation, and the World System, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Thompson, Jon (1993), ‘Realisms and Modernisms: Raymond Williams and
Popular Fiction’, in D. L. Dworkin and L. G. Roman, Views beyond the
Border Country: Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics, New York and
London: Routledge, pp. 72–91.
Warwick, Alexandra (2013), ‘Ghosts, Monsters and Spirits, 1840−1900’, in
G. Byron and D. Townshend (eds), The Gothic World, London: Routledge,
pp. 366−75.
Williams, Raymond [1977] (2009), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

5. Reader-response Criticism
In contrast to liberal humanism, the reader-response approach to lit-
erature rejects the idea that texts contain certain inviolable, enduring,
fixed meanings transmitted to an inherently passive reader. Neither
are the intentions of the author or the form and content of the text
considered the sole repositories of meaning. On the contrary, meaning
is seen as being created by the reader as he or she engages with the
text.
The reader-response approach has been useful within popular fic-
tion studies because it has allowed critics to engage with issues of
readership and gender in particular in a very direct way. In fact, one of
the most well-known reader-response studies is an analysis of the way

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in which a small group of readers engaged with a popular genre: Janice

A. Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984). Radway’s approach was
informed by the ethnographic approach (a methodology she derived
from anthropology). She undertook an empiric investigation of popu-
lar reading habits, focusing in particular upon the ‘social event’ of
reading. She did this by investigating the preferences and attitudes of
a small group of women in the Midwestern community of ‘Smithton’,
all of whom interacted on a regular basis with the local bookstore
proprietor, ‘Dot’, whose recommendations and opinions of particular
romance novels and authors were highly influential within this circle.
Radway, a feminist critic who began the study with (as she later
admitted) some major reservations about what she initially perceived
to be the inherently problematic nature of the romance genre, was
particularly interested in exploring the intimate relationship between
these women and the novels that they were reading. Her discussion
sessions with this small group of romance fans led her to the conclu-
sion that, amongst other things, the genre functioned as an invaluable
‘compensatory’ literature for middle-class wives and mothers, sup-
plying them with emotional release that would otherwise have been
denied them in the course of their everyday lives, because their pro-
scribed social roles left them little room for ‘guiltless, self-interested
pursuit of individual pleasure’ (1984: 95).
Radway’s discussions with the Smithton women also informed her
construction of a structuralist outline of what they considered to be
the narrative elements of the ‘ideal romance’. As Radway acknowl-
edged at the time, the small nature of her sample group meant that
her argument could only be applied with caution to the genre as a
whole, whilst some later critics (in particular Pamela Regis) have also
argued that the conclusions derived from her textual analysis were
flawed because they were confined to one particular sub-genre only
(the historical romance) and a limited number of authors. Radway
herself later critiqued what she characterised as some of her own
biases regarding the appeal and effect of the kind of ‘reading for
pleasure’ in which her subjects engaged. Nevertheless, Reading the
Romance remains a landmark study in reader-response criticism (as
well as popular fiction studies generally) not least for focusing aca-
demic attention upon both a genre and a group of readers that had
largely been overlooked until that point.
More recent exercises in reader-response criticism related to popu-
lar fiction, almost all of which reference Radway’s influence, have

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been particularly useful for exploring the ways in which actual reader
interpretations and interactions with texts complicate the assumptions
of authors, academics and the media. There have, for instance, been
several analyses of the Harry Potter phenomenon from this perspec-
tive, and the approach frequently comes up in critical discussions of
the Twilight series. More recently, E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey
series (2011–12) has also been the subject of reader-response analysis
(Deller 2013). The academic study of fanfiction, itself a form of popu-
lar fiction that has its direct roots in fan responses to a particular text,
also often draws upon the reader-response approach.

Bibliography
Deller, Ruth (2013), ‘Reading the BDSM Romance: Reader Responses to Fifty
Shades’, Sexualities, vol. 16, no. 8 (December), pp. 932–50.
Holub, Robert C. (1984), Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction, London:
Routledge.
Radway, Janice A. [1984] (1987), Reading the Romance, London: Verso.
Radway, Janice A. (1994), ‘Romance and the Work of Fantasy: Struggles
over Feminine Sexuality and Subjectivity at Century’s End’, in J. Vruz
and J. Lewis (eds), Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural
Reception, Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 213–31.
Regis, Pamela (2003), A Natural History of the Romance Genre, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Storey, John (2010), ‘Feminism and Romance Reading’, in Cultural Studies
and the Study of Popular Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 66–76.

6. Postmodernism and Popular Fiction

The emergence of postmodernism as a theoretical movement is gener-
ally linked to an increasing resistance towards the often rigid divisions
between high and low culture that were often held to be a central tenet
of modernism. Indeed, John Carey (in his 1992 book The Intellectuals
and the Masses) has argued that a frequently horrified response to
‘mass culture’ (and to ‘the masses’ themselves) was a central feature
of the modernist project in England in particular, as was a tendency
to see ‘mass culture’, the supposedly ‘debased’ products of what
Adorno and Horkheimer would characterise as the ‘culture industry’
as degraded and degrading artefacts that represented a dangerous and
even anti-democratic form of ‘levelling down’. This line of thought
can be detected in Q. D. and F. R. Leavis, as we have seen, but also in

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the post-war cultural criticism of US critic Dwight Macdonald, whose

1960 essay on the intertwined phenomena he referred to as ‘Masscult
and Midcult’ took a similarly dim view of the forms of popular cul-
ture he considered so bad that they were not so much ‘non art’ as
‘anti-art’ (2011: 4). Echoes of this distrust of the ‘popular’ can also
be detected in the work of more recent cultural commentators such
as Curtis White (The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for
Themselves, 2004) and Chris Hedges, who embarks upon a particu-
larly lacerating take on contemporary American culture in Empire of
Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2014).
As John Storey suggests, ‘the postmodernism of the late 1950s and
60s was therefore a populist attack on the elitism of modernism. It
signalled a refusal of what Andreas Huyssen (1986) calls “the great
divide [. . .] [a] discourse which insists on the categorical distinction
between high art and mass culture”’ (2009: 183). Postmodernism, as
Jean-François Lyotard famously put it in The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge (1979) is said to bring about a crisis in the
status of knowledge, and, according to his analysis, is defined by its
‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ – with the ‘metanarrative’ being
the broad frameworks that we use to tell the stories – political, cul-
tural, ideological – which allow us to understand and structure reality.
According to postmodernist theorists, there are no certain, inviolable
truths, and the inherent artificiality and uncertainty of the stories that
we tell ourselves is a given. One of the most significant early discus-
sions of the relationship between postmodernism and popular fiction
was American literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s 1969 essay ‘Cross the
Border – Close the Gap’. In it, he presciently suggested that the emerg-
ing postmodernist tendency in American literature would provide a
means of ‘closing the gap’ between high and low culture that had
been reinforced by modernism. Fiedler saw the continuation of what
he considered to be outmoded high-modernist distinctions between
‘High Art’ and ‘Mass Art’ as a manifestation of ‘concealed class bias’,
and argued that ‘Pop Art’ – including that which we would now call
‘popular fiction’ – was inherently political, and inherently subversive,
because it threatened all boundaries (1969: 287).
As Linda Hutcheon notes, Fiedler also argued that postmodernism
crossed boundaries – or ‘closed gaps’ – by ironising both high and low
culture (she gives the example of the mixing of religious history and
detective fiction in Umberto Eco’s 1980 bestseller The Name of the
Rose) or by using familiar genre tropes in sophisticated ways, or in

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parodic and metafictional forms (1988: 44). A good example of this

tendency can also be seen in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves
(2000), a haunted house novel that uses tropes and basic plot elements
seen in countless other supernatural horror stories, but is also, simul-
taneously (and typically for a postmodernist text), a witty and typo-
graphically inventive commentary on the nature of fiction and reality.
This is exactly the kind of epistemological uncertainty that thrives in
the postmodern text. As Hutcheon puts it, ‘Postmodernism is both
academic and popular, elitist and accessible’ (1988: 44). Indeed, it
has been suggested that increased academic interest in popular cul-
ture – including popular fiction – is itself representative of the kind
of erosion of traditional markers of cultural value associated with
postmodern thought.
The popular genre that has to date been most associated with post-
modernism is probably science fiction. As Bran Nicol has argued, ‘its
potential to offer an alternative to realism’ has itself proved central
to postmodernist thinking (2009: 164). Whilst Nicol argues that the
cyberpunk sub-genre is the most postmodern variety of SF, the genre
is also central to the postmodernist speculations of Fredric Jameson,
who uses a novel by Philip K. Dick as a starting point for his well-
known discussion of nostalgia in an essay featured in Postmodernism:
Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Popular fiction, for
Jameson, is part of what he characterises as the ‘paraliterature’ that
has arisen from the erosion of the ‘high-modernist frontier’ between
high culture and commercial culture, a ‘degraded landscape of schlock
and kitsch’ that fascinates postmodernists for this very reason (1991:
2).
One of the most interesting recent critical discussions regarding the
interplay between postmodernism and popular fiction specifically (as
opposed to the many postmodernist discussions related to popular
culture more generally, which tend to exclude genre fiction entirely)
is that revolving round what has become known as the ‘genrefication’
debate. The debate was sparked by the publication in 2012 of Arthur
Krystal’s essay ‘Easy Writers: Guilty Pleasures without Guilt’ in The
New Yorker, in which he argued that in comparison to the clear
boundaries between literary and genre fiction of a previous age, ‘the
literary climate has changed: the canon has been impeached, formerly
neglected writers have been saluted, and the presumed superiority of
one type of book over another no longer passes unquestioned’ (2012:
online). Krystal’s piece aroused a great deal of critical ­ attention,

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in part because he had highlighted a trend that had been becom-

ing increasingly obvious: that younger American writers in particular
seem increasingly happy to subvert or circumvent entirely the old bar-
riers between genre and ‘literary’ or ‘serious’ fiction.
Responding to Krystal’s comments, fellow critic Lev Grossman
(himself the author of a well-received metafictional fantasy novel,
The Magicians, 2009), argued that genre fiction was prominent at the
moment due to more than the often-cited need for simple escapism.
Reciting a long list of writers associated with literary fiction who have
been borrowing from genre fiction of late, he argued that whilst we
expect literary revolutions to come from above, from ‘the difficult, the
high end, the densely written [. . .] I don’t think that’s what’s going
on. Instead we’re getting a revolution from below, coming up from the
supermarket aisles. Genre fiction is the technology that will disrupt the
literary novel as we know it’ (2012: online). In similar terms, Joshua
Rothman – who came up with the term ‘genrefication’ in the first
place – later suggested that we might be ‘headed for a total collapse of
the genre system’ – a ‘genre apocalypse’, in which, as Fiedler suggested
a generation ago, the old boundaries were no longer appropriate,
or indeed, applicable (2014: online). Therefore, one of the central
characteristics of postmodernist thought appears to have anticipated
the on-going evolution in the relationship between the ‘literary’ and
the ‘popular’. Indeed, Tim Lanzendörfer argues that, ‘The novel is
increasingly headed towards amalgamated forms that combine tradi-
tional realist forms – the bildungsroman, the social novel, the histori-
cal novel – with formal elements previously confined to the popular
genres of science fiction, crime and fantasy, among others’ (2016: 3).
It seems increasingly likely that he will be proved correct.

Bibliography
Connor, Stephen (1990), Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories
of the Popular, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Fiedler, Leslie [1969] (1975), ‘Cross the Border – Close the Gap’, in A New
Fiedler Reader, New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 270–94.
Grossman, Lev (2012), ‘Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre
Fiction is Disruptive Technology’, Time, 23 May [online].
Hutcheon, Linda (1988), A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,
Fiction, London: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric (1991), Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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 KEY CRITICAL APPROACHES  103

Krystal, Arthur (2012), ‘Easy Writers: Guilty Pleasures without Guilt’, The
New Yorker, 28 May [online].
Lanzendörfer, Tim (ed.) (2016), The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary
Novel, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Macdonald, Dwight (2011), Masscult and Midcult: Essays against the
American Grain, ed. J. Summers, New York: New York Review of Books.
Nicol, Bran (2009), ‘Two Postmodern Genres: Cyberpunk and “Metaphysical”
Detective Fiction’, in The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 164–84.
Rothman, Joshua (2014), ‘A Better Way to Think about the Genre Debate’,
The New Yorker, 6 November [online].
Storey, John (2009), ‘Postmodernism’, in Cultural Theory and Popular
Culture: An Introduction, Essex: Pearson Educational, pp. 187–217.

7. Race, Globalisation and Popular Fiction

Just as the long overdue turn towards issues of gender and sexual-
ity pioneered by feminist critics from the 1980s onwards heralded a
major shift of focus within literary and cultural studies in general, so
too is it likely (and necessary) that future developments regarding the
academic investigation of popular fiction will involve an increasing
emphasis upon the representation and interrogation of issues related
to race, nationality and ethnicity. There is also much scope for further
study into the way in which specific generic archetypes and tropes
originating from a Western context have been adapted and trans-
formed by authors and readers who originate from outside these cul-
tural and geographical contexts, as well as the ways in which Western
authors appropriate and reconfigure concepts adopted from outside
their own cultural context.
There has been an inherent bias towards the discussion of works by
white, English-speaking authors within popular fiction studies to date.
The long-standing commercial dominance of British and American
publishing conglomerates and booksellers means that novels and sto-
ries first published in the English language have a higher global profile
and wider distribution pattern than those initially written in other
languages. In addition, as any introduction to popular fiction has to
acknowledge, all of the major popular genres have their principal
roots in forms of writing in English that emerged during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. It is also worth noting that almost all of the
major existing works on popular fiction as a general subject area (as
opposed to works dedicated to specific popular genres or sub-genres)

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have been written by academics associated with the British university

system in particular. This in part reflects the fact that the strong cul-
tural studies tradition established in the UK during the 1960s played a
considerable role in focusing academic attention there on all forms of
popular culture, including popular fiction, before it had gained a firm
foothold elsewhere.
Academics from an Anglocentric and North American back-
ground also have a tendency to focus upon popular texts that have
emerged from within a publishing tradition and a historical context
with which they are already acquainted. A similar tendency to focus
upon that which is culturally ‘familiar’ has also informed the study
of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North American popular fic-
tion. Even very recent overviews of popular fiction tend to mention
non-British and non-American texts only in passing. Indeed, because
it is intended to provide a representative introduction to the state of
contemporary popular fiction, the book you are reading right now is
no different. This bias, whilst perhaps understandable to an extent
for practical reasons to do with the origins and evolution of popular
fiction, does mean that the opportunities to engage with pre-existing
and emerging genre fiction from the non-English speaking (and non-
Western) world in particular are often overlooked. As has become
troublingly apparent in recent years, the publishing world is still
an overwhelmingly white and Anglophone one, which means that
publishing opportunities for aspiring genre authors whose fiction
is not deemed sufficiently ‘commercial’ have also been somewhat
curtailed.
The one major exception in recent years has been the substan-
tial amount of media and academic attention paid to the so-called
‘Nordic Noir’ phenomenon. However, whilst these novels were ini-
tially published in languages other than English, they still involve
predominately white protagonists, and are, by their very nature, obvi-
ously Eurocentric. Within the subject areas related to specific popular
genres, there has been, however, more of an effort to acknowledge and
engage with racial, ethnic and geographical diversity. For instance,
the ‘Global Gothic’ initiative (which originated at Stirling University,
Scotland) is intended to help focus critical attention upon horror and
gothic texts and traditions from around the world, in order to help
broaden the traditional focus upon European and North American
authors and texts only. Similarly, ‘The International Crime Fiction
Research Group’ based at Queen’s University, Belfast, centres on

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 KEY CRITICAL APPROACHES  105

issues of transnational circulation and cross-cultural exchange par-

ticular to that genre.
Because science fiction so often dramatises anxieties related to
the depiction of the ‘alien’ other, hybridity and imperialism, it lends
itself particularly well to critical inquiry informed by postcolonial
theories and perspectives. Recent examples in this vein include Jessica
Langer’s Postcolonialism and Science Fiction (2012) and John Rieder’s
Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008). In addi-
tion, Helen Young has recently used the fantasy genre as a ‘micro-
cosm of popular culture to investigate the discourses around race and
racial difference which circulate in the Anglophone world’ (2016: 1).
Langer notes that science fiction written in non-English languages has
tended to be marginalised by the global publishing industry (and, as
noted above, the same is arguably true of popular fiction in general),
as has work by writers of colour and writers from ‘post-colonial’
backgrounds.
It’s an insight that highlights one of the paradoxes of an increas-
ingly globalised ‘culture industry’. On the one hand, cheaper, faster
publishing techniques, wider distribution, and in particular, the trans-
formations that digital publishing has wrought upon the industry in
the past decade should, in theory, lead to more diversity and much
greater access and opportunity for authors of all national, racial and
geographical backgrounds. However, just as the emergence of the
global blockbuster on cinema screens has led to accusations of increas-
ing blandness and homogeneity, so is there the danger that instant
access to European and American popular fiction will have the conse-
quence of pushing distinctively ‘home-gown’ genre fiction even further
towards the periphery of wider cultural visibility.
Yet, as the work of academics working within a range of areas
also highlights, popular fiction manifests itself in many fascinating
and telling ways around the world. Specific types of popular fiction
may originate within particular national contexts (for instance, Japan
invented both Manga and the so-called ‘Light’ novel), or specific racial
and ethnic contexts (as is the case with the genre known as ‘Street
Lit’, which is particularly associated with African American authors
and readers). In addition, genres that may seem quite familiar from a
British or North American perspective have rich histories elsewhere
in the world that are only just beginning to be academically explored.
For instance, there is a whole parallel pop culture history of the Cold
War to be found in the many science fiction novels from the Soviet

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Union and Eastern Europe published between the introduction of

Communism and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Thanks to the
recent success of 2015 Hugo Award winner The Three-Body Problem
by Liu Cixin (2008: released in English translation in 2014), Chinese
SF is only now appearing on the publishing radar in the West. Just as
worthwhile are examinations of how genres associated with the West
have been appropriated by non-Western writers. India has had a thriv-
ing comics scene since the 1980s, with titles that often feature home-
grown superheroes who combine aspects of both Hindu mythology
with more familiar (to Western eyes) genre tropes. There is also a
large readership for a distinctively Indian variety of ‘Chick-Lit’ novels
focusing on young, urban professionals.
Aside from the need to examine distinctive national varieties and
adaptations of popular genres, scholars within popular fiction stud-
ies are also becoming increasingly conscious of issues pertaining to
racial and ethnic representation. For instance, as the extensive media
coverage surrounding the debut of the Pakistani-American (and
proudly Muslim) Marvel comics superheroine ‘Ms. Marvel’ in 2013
demonstrates, genre fiction in all of its modes and formats is still
dominated by white authors and white protagonists, to the extent
that a break-out star such as Kamala Khan becomes of even greater
significance to readers who might otherwise have felt excluded from
mainstream media representation. Social media campaigns such as
the US-based ‘We Need Diverse Books’ movement, which began by
calling for greater diversity within children’s and young adult books
and soon attracted a great deal of supportive media coverage and
online-commentary, also emphasise the growing online clamour for
publishers to engage with a more diverse and racially inclusive range
of readers and authors. Whilst, as previously noted, the tendency to
focus predominately upon English-speaking, white, and British and
American authored texts does undoubtedly owe much to the historical
development of popular fiction, it is obvious that one of the subject’s
major growth areas involves the need for around a more nuanced,
representative consideration of issues pertaining to race, ethnicity and
nationality.

Bibliography
Byron, Glennis (ed.) (2013), Global Gothic, Manchester: Manchester
University Press.

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 KEY CRITICAL APPROACHES  107

Langer, Jessica (2012), Post-Colonialism and Science Fiction, Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan.
Storey, John (1996), ‘Globalisation and Popular Culture’, in Cultural Studies
and the Study of Popular Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 160–72.
Young, Helen (2016), Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of
Whiteness, New York: Routledge.
The International Crime Fiction Research Group: <http://international-
crimefiction.org/​about-2/​> (last accessed 15 April 2016)
We Need Diverse Books: <http://weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/​> (last
accessed 15 April 2016)
Ken Liu, ‘China Dreams: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction’ <http://
clarkesworldmagazine.com/​liu_12_14/​> (last accessed 15 April 2016)

8. Feminism, Sexuality and Gender Studies

The emergence of a distinctly feminist approach to literature in general
(and therefore popular fiction specifically) is directly related to the
establishment of the modern women’s rights movement in the 1960s
and 1970s. Feminist activists and theorists were acutely conscious
of the relationship between the mass media and the perpetuation
of restrictive ideas about gender roles and ‘appropriate’ modes of
behaviour for both men and women (Rich 2007). For instance, Betty
Friedan devoted a chapter of The Feminine Mystique (1963) to an
interrogation of the way in which popular women’s magazines of
the 1950s allegedly promoted a repressive domestic ideology through
their consistent reproduction of the image of the ‘Happy Housewife
Heroine’ in articles, advertisements and popular fiction. One impor-
tant early discussion of popular fiction from an explicitly feminist
perspective came in the 1972 essay ‘What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why
Women Can’t Write’, in which author and critic Joanna Russ argued
that there were very few stories in which women were protagonists,
because women were always perceived from a male perspective. ‘Our
literature is not about women. It is not about women and men equally.
It is by and about men’ (1995: 81). Even when women did appear, she
stated, they existed only in relation to the male protagonist, or were
reduced to a small number of crude character types, which only rein-
forced the social roles that they were supposed to play. Russ then went
on to suggest that three specific types of genre fiction – the ‘whodunit’,
supernatural fiction and her own favourite genre as a writer, science
fiction – could present the possibility of an escape from the ‘Culture

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= Male’ equation because they utilised plots that were not limited to
one sex, because the sex of the protagonist was irrelevant. Russ’s later
essay, ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think it’s My Husband’
(1973), on the so-called ‘Modern Gothics’ − mass market romances
featuring plots in which virginal heroines were drawn to dangerous,
but charismatic older men – combined witty structuralist analysis with
astute social critique.
Given that romance fiction was (and remains) the popular genre
most associated with female writers and authors, a tendency which
many critics claim helps account for the fact that the genre was largely
ignored by academia until the rise of feminist criticism in the 1970s
and 1980s, it is hardly surprising that several of the most significant
feminist studies of popular fiction deal specifically with the romance.
For some feminist theorists the romance was even seen as a deeply
problematic form of writing that perpetuated the reproduction of
conservative social norms. In The Female Eunuch (1970) for instance,
Germaine Greer famously argued that romance novels encouraged
women to cherish ‘the chains of their own bondage’ (1971: 180).
Indeed, as Joanne Hollows outlines in Feminism, Femininity and
Popular Culture (2000) this critical outlook on romance fiction, seen
also in the work of other second-wave critics such Kate Millett and
Shulamith Firestone was all part of a more general resistance towards
the idea of ‘romance’ within culture as a whole – it was seen as a
means of reinforcing existing, societal structures and expectations and
distracting women from the reality of their own exploitation and
manipulation (72).
Romance fiction would begin to attract more sustained and nuanced
analysis from the 1980s onwards, although some feminist critics still
had major reservations. Tanya Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance:
Mass Produced Fantasies for Women (1982) devoted a chapter to
Harlequin Romances and concluded that whilst they did provide
a valuable outlet for the expression of female dissatisfaction with
male−female relationships, they also never questioned the primacy of
these relationships, or of the patriarchal myths and institutions that
underpin society. Janice A. Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984)
linked the meaning of the romance-reading experience to the need for
emotional release desired by her sample group, who had otherwise
subordinated their own desires to those of their families.
Many of the conclusions reached by Radway and Modleski would
themselves be critiqued by another important study of the genre,

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 KEY CRITICAL APPROACHES  109

Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003),

in which it is argued that the genre has been sorely misunderstood
by literary critics, in part because the second-wave feminists saw the
romance novel, as she puts it, as ‘an enslaver of women’ that rein-
forced heterosexual and patriarchal ideology (6). Later discussions
of romance fiction and its various offshoots – such as the Chick-Lit
boom of the 1990s – would inspire a similarly diverse range of critical
opinions, often coalescing around the question of whether or not the
romance itself (and the act of reading the romance) can be seen as a
liberating or ultimately anti-feminist act. More recently, we can also
see these kinds of arguments revolve around post-2000 bestsellers
such as the Twilight saga and The Fifty Shades series.
Feminist readings have by now been applied to every popular genre,
with crime fiction and science fiction in particular having attracted
much commentary of this nature, in part perhaps because both genres
attracted explicitly feminist authors in the 1970s and after. Within
crime fiction, female private detectives and police officers became
increasingly significant (and of course, ‘Golden Age’ of the 1930s and
1940s detective fiction had some very notable women authors, most
famously Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers). The built-in ability
of both SF and fantasy to offer imaginative alternatives to the world
as we currently understand it was particularly attractive to feminist
authors such as Sherri S. Tepper, Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, Alice
Sheldon (better known as ‘James Tiptree Jr.’) and Ursula K. Le Guin
during the 1970s and after. Although the two most influential femi-
nist studies of the horror genre – Men, Women and Chain Saws:
Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) by Carol J. Clover and The
Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1993) by
Barbara Creed – focus on film rather than fiction, they were hugely
influential for critical considerations of the genre as a whole, particu-
larly because they explored the way in which women were so often
depicted as the monstrous ‘Other’ in horror narratives.
Because part of the feminist project is to unearth and celebrate
the work of women writers and texts that have been neglected or
forgotten about, texts from a wide range of genres and sub-genres are
now being looked at from fresh perspectives, and further demonstrate
popular fiction’s capacity for telling stories about marginalised indi-
viduals even within mass culture itself. For instance, as Kaye Mitchell
(2012) notes, there was a thriving market for lesbian pulp fiction in
the US in the 1950s and 1960s, and, as she observes, whilst many of

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these books were written largely for the titillation of an assumed male
reader, their frank representation of same-sex relationships meant that
they assumed considerable cultural importance for women who oth-
erwise felt completely unrepresented within mainstream heterosexual
culture (130). Similarly, literary critics more generally are now paying
much closer attention to popular fiction written by female writers in
the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The growing prominence of the feminist approach to literary studies
has also helped focus greater attention on issues related to gender and
sexuality in a more general sense. Since the 1990s in particular, critical
work exploring representations of masculinity as well as characters
and issues related to LGBTQ topics has become more visible. The
field of ‘Masculinity Studies’ (or ‘Men’s Studies’ as it is sometimes
called) draws upon the work of sociologists such as Michael Kimmel
and R. W. Connell and is particularly concerned with exploring what
are said to be the often stifling and repressive hegemonic expectations
of masculinity and the construction of masculine identity. As within
feminism, exploring the way in which social and cultural expecta-
tions of gendered behaviour are created involves looking at the way
in which certain representations manifest themselves within popular
culture, including popular fiction.
In Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular
Genres, 1945–2000 (2006), Brian Baker discusses science fiction,
fantasy and spy fiction in a bid to explore the relationship between
representations of masculinity in popular genres and their link with
the ideological imperatives of the American and British nation states
during and after the Cold War era, arguing that these forms of mascu-
linity reveal much about ‘the cultural, social and political formations
of their period of production’ (vii). Other critics have discussed spe-
cific genres from this perspective, as is the case in Lee Clarke Mitchell’s
work on ‘the persistent obsession with masculinity associated with
the Western’ (3), or Andrea Ochsner’s 2011 discussion of the so-
called ‘Lad lit’ sub-genre that emerged during the 1990s. However,
as Ochsner also points out, there are still relatively few critical discus-
sions on the topic of masculinity in popular fiction to date.
Another important and relatively recent development has been the
emergence of theorists who examine popular fiction from an LGBTQ
perspective as well as from a ‘Queer Theory’ perspective. This opening
up to alternative viewpoints – and in particular, this exploration of
issues explicitly related to complex and evolving questions of sexual

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 KEY CRITICAL APPROACHES  111

orientation and gender identity – is itself arguably representative of

the growing interest in and acceptance of diverse and at one time
marginalised perspectives demonstrative of the postmodern turn in
literary studies. There has been considerable work done on the rep-
resentation of LGBTQ characters and themes within three popular
genres in particular: horror and the gothic (whose foregrounding of
the ‘monstrous’ other since the very beginnings of the genre has often
lent itself to interpretations of this sort, as critics such as Paulina
Palmer and George E. Haggerty have outlined), crime fiction and sci-
ence fiction. As the editors of Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science
Fiction (2008) note, ‘If we take the central task of Queer Theory as the
work of imagining a world in which all lives are liveable, we under-
stand Queer Theory as being both utopian and Science Fictional, in
the sense of imagining a future that opens out, rather than forecloses
possibilities for becoming real, for mattering in the world’ (5). As is
the case within literary studies in general, the fact that critics are now
willing to appraise popular texts from within a wide variety of theo-
retical and ideological perspectives related to the depiction of gender,
sexuality and sexual orientation is yet another indication that popular
fiction studies is becoming an ever more richly diverse and expansive
field of academic inquiry.

Bibliography
Baker, Brian (2006), Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in
Popular Genres, 1945–2000, London: Continuum.
Carr, Helen (ed.) (1989), From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women’s Writing
in the Postmodern World, London: Pandora.
Cranny-Francis, Anne (1990), Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic
Fiction, New York: St Martin’s Press.
Gordon, Joan, Hollinger, Veronica and Pearson, Wendy Gay (eds) (2008),
Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
Greer, Germaine (1971), The Female Eunuch, London: Paladin.
Hollows, Joanne (2000), Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture,
Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Kinsman, Margaret (2010), ‘Feminist Crime Fiction’, in C. Nickerson (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 148–63.
Makinen, Merja (2001), Feminist Popular Fiction, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Mitchell, Kaye (2012), ‘Gender and Sexuality in Popular Fiction’, in. D. Glover

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 112  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

and S. McCracken (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 122–40.
Mitchell, Lee Clark (2006), The Western: Making the Man in Fiction and
Film, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Munford, Rebecca and Waters, Melanie (eds) (2014), Feminism and Popular
Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique, New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Ochsner, Andrea (2011), ‘Who is that Man? Lad Trouble in High Fidelity,
The Best a Man Can Get and White City Blue, in S. Horlacher (ed.),
Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to
the Present, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 247–67.
Radford, Jean (ed.) (1986), The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular
Fiction, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Radway, Janice A. (1984), Reading the Romance, Chapael Hill: North
Carolina University Press.
Regis, Pamela (2003), A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Rich, Jennifer (2007), An Introduction to Modern Feminist Theory, Tirril:
Humanities-EBooks.
Russ, Joanna (1995), ‘To Write Like a Woman’: Essays on Feminism and
Science Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Whelehan, Imelda (2005), The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single
Girl to Sex and the City, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wolmarck, Jenny (1986), Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and
Postmodernism, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

9. Ecocriticism and Popular Fiction

Within a North American context in particular, the ecocritical
approach to literature has proved to be one of the major critical
approaches to have emerged in recent decades, and as such, it is hardly
surprising that it has also gradually begun to influence popular fiction
studies. Ecocriticism, which began in US and UK universities in the
early 1980s, focuses, as Cheryll Glotfelty has put it, ‘on the relation-
ship between literature and the natural environment’ (1996: xviii). It
is an area of critical inquiry that has taken on particular significance in
recent years due to the ever-accelerating sense of environmental crisis
informed by the fact that, as all but the most ideologically-blinkered
observers would acknowledge, the effects of global climate change are
becoming devastatingly apparent.
One of the most obvious manifestations of ecological anxiety within
popular fiction has been the emergence of the (purportedly) new sci-
ence fiction sub-genre known as ‘Cli-Fi’ (or ‘Climate Change Fiction’),

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although, as several well-known science fiction authors have rightly

pointed out, the genre has been dramatising ecological anxieties related
to global warming for decades (J. G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned
World depicted a future London ravaged by the consequences of solar
radiation as far back as 1962). Because the horror and science fiction
genres in particular lend themselves so well to the depiction of worst-
case scenarios, and because dystopian science fiction in particular so
often draws upon political and social undercurrents within the culture
of that particular moment, the most significant pop-fiction related to
eco-critical interventions have to date focused upon these two genres.
The publication in 2012 of the essay collection Ecogothic (edited by
Andrew Smith and William Hughes) represented the first major study
of how the gothic genre engages with images of environmental catas-
trophe, the wilderness, nature and the post-eco apocalypse world,
and it has since become a significant area of emerging interest within
horror and gothic studies. The term ‘eco-horror’ is also used within
this context to describe the many ‘Revenge of Nature’ narratives that
have manifested themselves since the 1970s in particular. The eco-
critical approach has also been persuasively applied to science fiction
texts and authors (as in Frederick Buell’s From Apocalypse to Way of
Life, 2004), which contains an excellent chapter on depictions of envi-
ronmental crisis in popular literature and film), as well as books such
as Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014). A wider range
of popular genres, including crime, are discussed by Patrick Murphy
in his book Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies:
Fences, Boundaries and Fields (2010), which also discusses the way
in which popular fiction has engaged with issues of ecological signifi-
cance. Environmental anxieties have frequently manifested themselves
within YA fiction in recent years, with series such as The Carbon
Diaries: 2015 (2009) by Saci Lloyd, Blood Red Road by Moira Young
(2011), Breathe by Sarah Crossan (2012) and The Ship by Antonia
Honeywell (2015), all of which feature a world devastated by global
warning and its ecological and political consequences.

Bibliography
Buell, Frederick (2004), From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental
Crisis in the American Century, New York: Routledge.
Garrard, Greg (2004), Ecocriticism, London: Routledge.
Glotfelty, Cheryll (1996), ‘Introduction’, in C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds),

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 114  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Athens: The

University of Georgia Press, pp. xv−xxxvii
Hughes, William and Andrew Smith (eds) (2013), Ecogothic, Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Murphy, Patrick (2010), Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural
Studies: Fences, Boundaries and Fields, Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Tonn, Shara (2015), ‘Cli-Fi – That’s Climate Fiction – is the new Sci-Fi’,
Wired, 17 July, <http://www.wired.com/​2015/​07/​cli-fi-thats-climate-fic​
tion-new-sci-fi/​> (last accessed 15 April 2015).
Ullrich, J. K. (2015), ‘Climate Fiction: Can Books Save the Planet?’, The
Atlantic, 14 August, <http://www.theatlantic.com/​entertainment/​archive/​
2015/​08/​climate-fiction-margaret-atwood-literature/​400112/​>(last accessed
15 April 2016).

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 Major Popular Genres

Fantasy
There have been many attempts to define fantasy, but one of the most
useful recent definitions is that provided by Farah Mendlesohn and
Edward James, which also persuasively distinguishes it from the genre
it is most often conflated with: ‘The most obvious construction of
fantasy in literature and art is the presence of the impossible and the
unexplainable. This tends to cut out most science fiction, which, while
it may deal with the impossible, regards everything as [rationally]
explicable’ (2009: 3). In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981),
Rosemary Jackson notes that the term ‘fantasy’ has traditionally been
applied rather indiscriminately to any form of literature that does not
give priority to realistic representation.
‘Commercial’ or ‘genre’ fantasy in its current incarnation owes an
immense debt to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, in that without the phe-
nomenal success of The Lord of the Rings series (1954–5) the genre’s
landscape would likely be very different today. Brian Attebery even sug-
gests that Tolkien is largely responsible for ‘separating fantasy from its
ancestral forms’ (1992: XIII). Indeed, many of the most notable tropes
present in the modern ‘epic’ fantasy novel are strongly influenced by his
legacy. However, it is important to note that there are also clear pop
fiction antecedents of this variety of fantasy that predate Tolkien, such
as the American pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s that did much
to establish the ‘Sword and Sorcery’ tradition. In addition, it should also
be stressed that fantasy also has a large number of sub-genres, recur-
rent tropes and thematic concerns which differ substantially from the
‘secondary world’ heroic fantasy type, as the exhaustive reference work
The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy (freely available online) demonstrates.
Since 2000, fantasy children’s literature has made a major con-
tribution to the current commercial prominence of the genre. As
Clive Bloom notes, the work of Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling is

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­ ivotal in this regard (2008: 275). The genre has also benefited from
p
the success of high-profile film and television adaptations of classic
novels, such as Peter Jackson’s blockbuster The Lord of the Rings
trilogy (2001–3) and the critically acclaimed television series Game of
Thrones (2011–), which adapts George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice
and Fire series (1996–). Martin’s bleak worldview and uncompromis-
ing sex and violence also helped establish the ‘Grimdark’ sub-genre,
which has been characterised as a reaction to the supposedly ‘sani-
tised’ epic fantasy of the past.
Another major fantasy trend of recent years has been the emer-
gence of ‘Urban Fantasy’. Urban Fantasy in its current incarnation
features savvy, street-smart protagonists (often investigators of some
sort) who live in contemporary cityscapes in which the fantastical
and the supernatural exist alongside everyday reality. It has proved
particularly popular with female readers and authors (although there
are also many prominent male authors and protagonists). Though
Urban Fantasy is a relatively new publishing category, like fantasy in
the broadest sense of the term, it still revolves around the relationship
between ‘the magical, the strange, the weird, the wondrous’, and ‘the
mundane, the world we know’ (Guran 2011: 145).

Bibliography
Attebury, Brian (1992), Strategies of Fantasy, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Bloom, Clive (2008), Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Clute, John and John Grant (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy <http://sf-en​
cy​clopedia.uk/fe.php/>.
Guran, P. (2011), ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Urban Fantasy’,
in P. S. Beagle and J. R. Lansdale (eds), The Urban Fantasy Anthology, San
Francisco: Tachyon Publications, pp. 137–45.
Hume, Kathryn (2014), Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western
Literature, London: Routledge.
Jackson, Rosemary (1981), Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London:
Methuen & Co. Ltd.
James, Edward and Farah Mendlesohn (2009), A Short History of Fantasy,
London: Middlesex University Press.
James, Edward and Farah Mendlesohn (2012), The Cambridge Companion to
Fantasy Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stableford, Brian (2009), The A−Z of Fantasy Literature, Lanham: Scarecrow
Press.

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 MAJOR POPULAR GENRES  117

Horror
Horror is, revealingly, the only genre with a name that derives from
an emotional response. Although other genres may of course include
occasional moments of ‘horror’, one may reasonably say that within
the horror genre, the evocation of dread, disgust and fear is the prime
intention of the author. Of course, the variety of fear being elicited
may differ widely depending on what one is reading, and one’s own
emotional and psychological trigger points.
The terms ‘horror’ and ‘gothic’ are often used interchangeably by
critics and readers, and, as Clive Bloom has usefully observed, there
exists ‘a multiplicity of apparently substitutable terms to cover the
same thing – gothic tale, ghost tale, terror romance, gothic horror . .
. it becomes clear that while “horror” and “gothic” are often (if not
usually) interchangeable, there are, of course, gothic tales that are
not horror fiction (Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is a good example)
and horror tales that contain no real gothic elements (Elizabeth
Bowen’s “The Cat Jumps”)’ (2000: 155). The horror genre is, how-
ever, an offshoot of the wider gothic tradition, and many of the
genre’s most distinctive settings and patterns had their beginnings
there. In addition, horror narratives almost always have a threaten-
ing ‘Other’ although that ‘Other’ can be of both internal and external
origin.
Horror fiction can be divided into two basic categories: supernatu-
ral and non-supernatural. In the supernatural horror tale, unease is
usually created by the violation of the supposedly orderly, rational
laws of nature. Supernatural horror fiction often features monsters
that in equal measure attract and repulse. They frequently dramatise
aspects of ourselves that we find objectionable but inescapable.
The non-supernatural horror tale has become increasingly signifi-
cant since the end of the Second World War, when the real-life hor-
rors of the Holocaust and the advent of the nuclear age prompted a
move away from more fantastical terrors to horror narratives set in
everyday locales that dramatise fears arising from human rather than
external monstrosity. Many of the genre’s most effective post-1950s
narratives are related from the perspective of characters unable to reli-
ably differentiate between reality and fantasy. Mental instability and
outright psychopathy often feature. This is why it is the figure of the
serial killer that represents modern horror fiction’s most emblematic
modern ‘Other’ (serial killers regularly feature in crime novels and

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thrillers as well, meaning that the lines between the genres are often
blurred these days).
One of the most notable post-2000 trends within horror fiction has
been the popularity of apocalyptic narratives, especially those featur-
ing zombies (although vampires, climate change and killer viruses have
all featured too). Although horror fiction is no longer the high-profile
commercial publishing category it was during the 1970s and 1980s,
one of the best-selling authors of the past forty years, Stephen King,
is best known for horror fiction (although he has written in other
genres, most notably crime, of late). The small-press horror scene is
also thriving and, as the ‘Creepypasta’ phenomenon indicates, horror
fiction has found a receptive new home online. Many supernatural
horror tropes have also recently been assimilated into the paranormal
romance and urban fantasy sub-genres, both of which frequently fea-
ture werewolves, ghosts, witches, demons and vampires.

Bibliography
Bloom, Clive (2000), ‘Horror Fiction: In Search of a Definition’, in D. Punter
(ed.), A Companion to the Gothic, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 155–66.
Carroll, Noel (1990), The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart,
New York: Routledge.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] (2012), ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, in S. T.
Joshi (ed.), The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, New York:
Hippocampus Press [online].
Nelson, Victoria (2012), Gothika: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the
New Supernatural, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Reyes, Xavier Aldana (ed.) (2016), Horror: A Literary History, London:
British Library.
Skal, David J. (1994), The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror,
London: Plexus.
Wisker, Gina (2005), Horror Fiction: An Introduction, New York: Continuum.

Science Fiction
Science fiction is often said to be the most intellectually and philo-
sophically ambitious variety of popular fiction. It grapples with many
of the most urgent questions associated with life as a rational, ques-
tioning human being; indeed, problematising just what it means to
be human has long been one of the genre’s main narrative tropes.
Another key preoccupation is the genre’s interest in the transforma-
tive potential of scientific and technological advances. George Slusser

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contends that ‘Science Fiction is about science. It is the sole literary

form that examines the ways in which science penetrates, alters, and
transforms the themes, forms and world view of fiction’ (2008: 27).
As Peter Nicholls notes, in the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction,
the term ‘science fiction’ did not become widely used until the 1950s,
although genre science fiction was already becoming recognisable as a
distinct literary category by that stage (1999: 569). However, though
it did not become named or defined until the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, many of the elements, story templates and
preoccupations we now associate with SF were formulated centuries
before. The generally accepted origins of modern science fiction are
said to have begun in the Renaissance, and most particularly in the
utopian writings of authors such as Thomas More, Frances Bacon
and Jonathan Swift (Pringle 1997: 8–18). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818) provided the genre with what would become one of its most
familiar storylines: that of the arrogant scientist who allows the thrill
of invention to blind him to the terrible consequences of his actions.
By the mid-nineteenth century a number of prominent American
writers had what we would now consider proto-SF elements in their
work (Nicholls 1999: 568). However, the author who perhaps made
the greatest impact upon the nineteenth-century popular imagina-
tion was Jules Verne, whose second novel, Journey to the Centre of
the Earth (1864), is considered the first great ‘scientific romance’. In
the 1890s, the novels of H. G. Wells helped mark the beginnings of
modern science fiction (Booker and Thomas 2009: 6). The American
pulp magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
also played a crucial role in establishing and shaping the genre as a
recognisable publishing category (Ashley 2008: 61). In 1926, the pub-
lication of the inaugural issue of the magazine Amazing Stories saw
the first ever English-language magazine dedicated to science fiction
stories.
The success of Amazing Stories inspired the launch of a host of
rival publications, foremost amongst them Astounding Science
Fiction (1930). Editor John Campbell helped usher in the so-called
‘Golden Age’ of American science fiction. Although the ‘Golden Age’
was dominated by American authors, the process of maturation it
underwent during the 1960s and 1970s owed much to the work of
British writers such as Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard and Brian
W. Aldiss. In the 1970s and after, female authors such as Ursula K.
Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Sheri S. Tepper, Kate Wilhelm and Margaret

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 120  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

Atwood used the genre as a means to dramatise issues relating to

the way in which women are treated in society. Richly imaginative
explorations of issues of race and sexuality also became increas-
ingly common. As the so-called ‘Sad Puppies’ controversy surround-
ing the 2015 Hugo Awards has indicated, however, not every genre
enthusiast has welcomed the increasingly ‘progressive’ nature of the
genre.
Since the mid-twentieth century, science fiction has become an ever-
more intellectually ambitious and thematically rich genre. Although
utopian visions, like the planetary romances and the ‘psychic powers’
tales of the 1950s have largely fallen out of favour, the dystopian
narrative, tellingly, has come roaring back into fashion since the mid-
2000s, and remains the sub-genre most likely to be tackled by ‘liter-
ary’ authors. The academic study of science fiction is thriving, with
present-day critics building on the work of earlier academics such as
Darko Suvin, whose concept of the ‘Novuum’ – the kind of ‘strange
newness’ that creates the ‘cognitive estrangement’ he identifies as
being a basic building block of the genre – has become a core critical
concept. However, in recent years, science fiction has been eclipsed
in popularity by fantasy, probably because fantasy is considered by
many readers to be a more ‘accessible’ form of imaginative fiction.
Sales figures released by Publisher’s Weekly related to the ‘Hottest
(and Coldest) Book Categories of 2014’ suggested that sales of adult
SF had also been hit hard by the success of YA titles belonging to the
‘Science Fiction/Fantasy/Magic’ categories.

Bibliography
Ashley, M. (2008), ‘Science Fiction Magazines: The Crucibles of Change’,
in D. Seed (ed.), A Companion to Science Fiction, Oxford: Blackwell, pp.
60–76.
Booker, M. Keith and Anne-Marie Thomas (eds) (2009), The Science Fiction
Handbook, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Clute, John and Peter Nicholls (eds) (1999), The Encyclopaedia of Science
Fiction, London: Orbit.
Landon, Brooks (2002), Science Fiction after 1900: From the Steam Man to
the Stars, London: Routledge.
Pringle, David (1997), The Ultimate Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction: The
Definitive Illustrated Guide, London: Carlton.
Roberts, Adam (2000), Science Fiction, London: Routledge.
Slusser, George (2008), ‘The Origins of Science Fiction’, in D. Seed (ed.), A
Companion to Science Fiction, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 27−42.

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 MAJOR POPULAR GENRES  121

Suvin, Darko (1979), Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press.

Crime
Crime has for decades been one of the most commercially successful
forms of popular fiction. The problem that faces us when we attempt
to neatly define crime fiction is a familiar one when it comes to dis-
cussing popular genres: the term encompasses multiple sub-genres
and narrative strategies. In the broadest sense, however, crime fiction
narratives tend to conform to much the same basic structure: a crime is
committed (often, but not by any means always, a murder); the crime
is investigated, either by a professional detective or an amateur sleuth;
and some kind of resolution or form of justice is achieved in the clos-
ing stages of the text. However, many novels clustered under the
‘crime fiction’ heading by publishers, booksellers and readers bypass,
subvert, or ignore these conventions.
Literary antecedents to the crime novel can be found hundreds,
even thousands of years ago. As Barry Forshaw notes, criminal acts
– and in particular, murder – provide the plot engines for many of
the most famous works of literature ever written (2007: 1). Stephen
Knight points out that so-called ‘murder pamphlets’ containing the
lurid details of grisly true crimes were very popular during Elizabethan
and Jacobean times, whilst Harold Schecter has shown that from the
earliest days of European settlement, North American readers were
also fascinated by accounts of real-life criminal atrocities (2008). One
of the most important proto-crime novels was William Godwin’s
Caleb Williams (1794), the tale of a moral young man who is wrongly
accused of murder. In American literature at about the same time, there
appeared Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799), which has
been described as ‘America’s first detective novel’. Another American,
the ever-adaptable Edgar Allan Poe, is an even more key figure, due to
his creation of the French detective C. Auguste Dupin, a major influ-
ence upon Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Dupin’s process of
deductive reasoning helped establish the ‘puzzle’ aspect of the genre as
one of its key attractions.
In the mid to late nineteenth century, novels grouped together
under the banner of so-called ‘Sensation Fiction’ often included strong
elements of the crime novel. This was perhaps most notable in the
work of Wilkie Collins, whose 1868 novel The Moonstone helped

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­ opularise the figure of the professional detective (Knight 2010: 44).

p
The police procedural and its various off-shoots (such as the tale of
forensic detection) remains one of the major sub-genres of crime fic-
tion to this day.
In the early to mid-twentieth century, there emerged a number
of authors whose contributions to detective fiction consolidated the
commercial popularity of the genre. By far the most celebrated author
was Agatha Christie. P. D. James – herself a towering figure within
the genre – has suggested that Christie’s appeal lies in what read-
ers perceive to be her evocation of a romanticised, rural England in
which society consists of a neatly ordered hierarchy in which everyone
knows their place (2011: 97). However, Christie’s work also had a
genuine ruthlessness to it that complicates perceptions of her as an
inherently ‘reassuring’ author.
As Lee Horsley notes, the crime writing tradition became steadily
more diverse throughout the twentieth century (2010: 28). In the
United States, the archetype of the cynical, hard-bitten private investi-
gator became the basis for seminal novels by writers such as Raymond
Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Micky Spillane. A new degree of
psychological complexity and realism had begun to emerge in the late
1940s and after, particularly in the work of authors such as Dorothy
B. Hughes, Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell.
Crime fiction also increasingly featured protagonists and plotlines that
represented previously marginalised sectors of society.
One of the major post-2000 trends in crime fiction is the ‘Nordic
Noir’ phenomenon, which refers to the boom in crime writing from
Scandinavia, influenced by the huge sales that accompanied the
publication in English translation of Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s
Millennium trilogy. The trend helped make English-language pub-
lishers (and readers) much more receptive to translated fiction from
‘international’ authors, many of whom had long been bestsellers in
their home countries.

Bibliography
Edwards, Martin (2015), The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the
Writers who Invented the Modern Detective Story, London: Harper Collins.
Forshaw, Barry (2007), The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, London: Rough
Guides.
Horsley, Lee (2005), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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Horsley, Lee (2010), ‘From Sherlock Holmes to the Present’, in Lee Horsley
and C. J. Rzepka (eds), A Companion to Crime Fiction, Oxford: Wiley
Blackwell, pp. 28–42.
James, P. D. (2011), Talking about Detective Fiction, New York: Vintage.
Knight, Stephen (2010), Crime Fiction since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Priestman, Martin (ed.) (2003), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schecter, Harold (ed.) (2008), True Crime: An American Anthology, New
York: Library of America.

Romance
In its original usage the term ‘romance’ was (and still is) deployed in
relation to medieval and Renaissance works of fiction featuring an
emphasis on martial deeds as well as scenes of courtship and love. It
has also been used to describe the work of authors writing in a non-
realist or allegorical vein. Within a popular fiction context, however,
the term always refers to stories in which the main focus of narra-
tive interest development is a romantic relationship. As Pamela Regis
argues, ‘A romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story
of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines’ (2003: 22).
However, as Regis and others have noted, marriage is by no means
always the outcome in contemporary romance novels, which increas-
ingly reflect the financial and social independence of their overwhelm-
ingly female readers. Statistics on the Romance Writers of America
(RWA) website indicate, at the time of writing, that 84 per cent of
American romance novel writers are female.
A romance may be set in any time period (‘historicals’ have always
been very popular). It may have a heroine and hero of any socio-­
economic, religious, national or educational background. Increasingly,
the genre has become more diverse, and it is now not uncommon to
find non-white characters as well as gay, lesbian and bisexual protago-
nists and love interests. Romance novels also differ widely in terms of
how sexually explicit they are: whilst some are relatively chaste, other
titles are quite explicit; indeed, every major romance publisher now
has a dedicated erotica line. Although many publishers issue specific
guidelines as to what they are looking for in relation to a specific
imprint, the scope of the genre in general is therefore quite broad.
However, it has been argued that no matter what form they take,
romance novels will always contain certain recurrent characteristics.

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Indeed, Regis’s contention that romance novels must always include

‘eight essential elements’ is one of the genre’s key critical assertions:

In one or more scenes, romance novels always depict the following: the
initial state of the society in which the hero and heroine must court, the
meeting between hero and heroine, the barrier to the union of hero and
heroine, the attraction between heroine and hero, the declaration of love
between heroine and hero, the point of ritual death, the recognition by
heroine and hero of the means to overcome the barrier, and the betrothal.
These elements are essential. (2003: 30)

Romance fiction has traditionally been one of the most academi-

cally neglected categories of popular fiction. Writing in 1982, Tania
Modleski critiqued the ‘double-critical standard’ that meant that the
then largely male body of ‘mass culture’ critics had either ignored or
overlooked ‘popular feminine narratives’, and argued that this was
because of a bias within Western culture towards male heroes and
male texts (1982: 12–13). Writing more recently, however, Regis
attributes much of the critical neglect of the genre to what she sees
as the tendency amongst feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s to
unfairly characterise the romance as a form of fiction that denies the
heroine an independent and fully individuated life outside of tradi-
tional models of love and marriage (2003: 13).
Critical debate surrounding the genre still is inclined to focus on
exploring whether or not romance fiction tends to reinforce conven-
tional gender roles and expectations (by making love, courtship and,
traditionally, marriage, the central interest of the heroine’s life) or to
subvert them, by dramatising themes surrounding intimate relation-
ships and providing a cathartic escape from everyday life. During the
1990s, the Chick-Lit sub-genre – which featured urban-based heroines
who self-effacingly juggled demanding careers with the quest for love
− aroused controversy amongst feminist commentators who variously
saw novels such as Bridget Jones’s Diary as either an endorsement of
or betrayal of the benefits reaped by second-wave feminism.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antecedents to the genre are
fairly easy to identify. These include Pamela (1740) by Samuel
Richardson, Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen and Jane
Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte. It took rather longer, however,
for the commercial romance novel as we would recognise it today
to emerge. A burst of popularity for the so-called ‘gothic romance’

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during the late 1960s and early 1970s helped create the commer-
cial conditions in which authors such as Rosemary Rogers, Kathleen
Woodwiss, Janet Dailey and Jayne Ann Krentz came to prominence
during the late 1970s and after. Regis also identifies the British writ-
ers Georgette Heyer (queen of the ‘Regency Romance’) and romantic
suspense author Mary Stewart as being key figures in establishing the
romance as a major publishing category. By far the most high-profile
romance author of the past two decades is Nora Roberts, who has, to
date, published more than 200 novels.
Romance fiction in what is known as the ‘category’ market owes
much to the British publishing firm Mills & Boon, and Canadian
publisher Harlequin, which for many decades has been the most pro-
lific producer of ‘category’ romance fiction in the world (Harlequin
has owned Mills & Boon since 1971). As Maryan Wherry notes,
‘category’ romances ‘are published under a common imprint or series
name, released at standard intervals, and frequently identified by
sequential numbers of a particular line’ (2014: 57). Harlequin cur-
rently publishes up to eighty-five novels a month.
Since 2000, the ‘paranormal romance’ has become one of the most
notable newer sub-genres, thanks in part to the immense popular and
commercial success of the Twilight trilogy (2005–8). In recent years,
the advent of e-books and e-readers has meant that the romance has
benefited from having an even more streamlined and accessible deliv-
ery system. E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) was a particu-
larly high-profile beneficiary of the ease and anonymity of the digital
download. Digital-only romance publishers and imprints have become
increasingly common, and according to the RWA website, around 40
per cent of romance novels in the US are now sold digitally.

Bibliography
Harzewski, Stephanie (2011), Chick Lit and Postfeminism, Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press.
McCracken, Scott (1998), ‘Popular Romance’, in Pulp: Reading Popular
Fiction, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 75–101.
Modleski, Tanya (1982), Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies
for Women, Hamden: Archon.
Radway, Janice A. (1984), Reading the Romance, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Regis, Pamela (2003), A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.

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 126  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

Wherry, Maryan (2014), ‘More than a Love Story: The Complexities of the
Popular Romance’, in C. Berberich (ed.), The Bloomsbury Introduction to
Popular Fiction, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 53–69.

Thriller
As Martin Rubin acknowledges in his Introduction to a book on
films that belong to this generic category, ‘the label thriller is widely
used but highly problematic’ (1999: 3). In short, it is problematic
because ‘thriller’ is in fact a very broad descriptive term: the ‘concept
of “thriller” falls somewhere between a genre proper and a descriptive
quality that is attached to other, more clearly defined genres, such as
spy thriller, detective thriller, horror thriller’ (Rubin 1999: 3). What
the term ‘thriller’ does suggest is a narrative in which the main pro-
tagonist is in peril from quite early on. Indeed, as Philip Simpson
notes ‘“thriller” in the generic sense, tends to connote an emphasis on
physical danger and action over in-depth character study’, a tendency
that owes much to its origins in late nineteenth-century pulp and sensa-
tion fiction (2010: 187). A thriller, then, need not begin (or even end)
with a mystery that must be solved, but regardless of the specifics, the
protagonist often faces considerable danger quite early on, and usually
a powerful antagonist of some sort, be it a specific person (a danger-
ous criminal, a corrupt politician, a rogue scientist, their own spouse)
or a system (a secret organisation, a government, a dangerous group).
Escalating anxiety is therefore a major characteristic. David Glover
notes, ‘the thriller was and still is to a large extent marked by the way in
which it persistently seeks to raise the stakes of the narrative, heighten-
ing or exaggerating the experience of events by transforming them into
a rising curve of danger, violence or shock’ (2003: 138). Sub-categories
include the psychological thriller, or ‘psycho thriller’ (in which the state
of mind of the protagonist or antagonist is of paramount narrative
significance), as well as thrillers related to specific professions, sce-
narios or threats – these include legal thrillers, medical thrillers, techno
thrillers, spy thrillers, serial killer thrillers, political thrillers and super-
natural thrillers. Although, as Glover says, many thrillers do feature
an investigative or deductive element (such as the ingenious variation
on the ‘locked-room’ murder mystery that represents one of the major
plot strands in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), these
features ‘when present [. . .] necessarily occupy only a secondary role’,
thus distinguishing them from the detective story (2003: 137).

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In recent years, many of the most high-profile thrillers on both sides

of the Atlantic have belonged to the so-called ‘Domestic Noir’ sub-
genre (the term was previously applied to certain female-focused noir
films of the 1940s and 1950s), in which suspense and narrative action
are generated by tensions and traumas arising from intimate relation-
ships (be they marital or familial). These novels make frequent use of
an unreliable narrator, as seen in the work of authors such as Gillian
Flynn (whose 2012 novel Gone Girl was a masterpiece of narra-
tive misdirection), S. J. Watson, Megan Abbott and Paula Hawkins.
Hawkins’s 2015 bestseller The Girl on the Train was a worldwide
hit that rapidly outsold even The Da Vinci Code in hardback sales
and spent sixteen consecutive weeks at the top of the NYT fiction
bestseller list. Along with the rather condescending descriptor ‘Chick
Noir’, the term ‘Grip Lit’ has also recently been used to describe these
kinds of thrillers: it was first coined by the novelist Marian Keyes,
who used it to explain her fondness for ‘really gripping books’ about
‘very recognisable women who live messy lives’. At the time of writ-
ing, the ‘Domestic Noir’ boom shows no signs of fizzling out. The
thriller has for many years been one of the most commercially suc-
cessful varieties of popular fiction, perhaps in part because the suc-
cessful thriller, by dint of the very nature of the genre, has to have a
compelling ‘hook’, ‘an intriguing element of originality, which draws
the reader in’, even if ‘Some, even most of the rest of the material can
be generic filler, over which the reader can skip or skim’ (McCracken
2012: 112).

Bibliography
Glover, David (2003), ‘The Thriller’, in M. Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Crime Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
135−54.
Horsley, Lee (2001), The Noir Thriller, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Horsley, Lee (2005), ‘Transgression and Pathology’, in Twentieth-Century
Crime Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 112–57.
McCracken, Scott (2012), ‘Reading Time: Popular Fiction and the Everyday’,
in D. Glover and S. McCracken (eds), The Cambridge Companion to
Popular Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 103–21.
Palmer, Jerry (1979), Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre,
London: St Martin’s Press.
Rubin, Martin (1999), Thrillers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Simpson, Philip (2010), ‘Noir and the Psycho Thriller’, in C. J. Rzepka and

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 128  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

L. Horsley (eds), A Companion to Crime Fiction, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell,

pp. 187–97.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1977), ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, in The Poetics
of Prose, New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 42–51.

Comic Books and Graphic Novels

Comic books cannot be considered a genre in the way that the previ-
ous entries in this section can. Rather, they constitute a mode, and as
such, individual titles can potentially encompass every conceivable
popular genre. The most influential definition of the comic book is that
provided by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics: The Invisible
Art (1993). Focusing on formal characteristics, McCloud argues that
the comic consists of ‘Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a
deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or produce
an aesthetic response in the reader’ (9). This contention has, how-
ever, been challenged. Robert C. Harvey points out that McCloud’s
definition contends that comics do not have to contain words and
counters by arguing that an essential criterion of the comic should
be verbal content (2009: 25). It is therefore perhaps more useful to
adopt the approach taken by researchers for whom ‘part of the defi-
nition of comics relates to production and market as well besides a
series of formal characteristics. According to such a definition, comics
were “born” with the mass production of American newspaper comic
strips in 1896’ (Christiansen and Magnusson 2000: 10). Certainly, the
three-panel newspaper strips that emerged at the end of the nineteenth
century did a huge amount, as Roger Sabin (2001) has demonstrated,
to help establish the mainstream comics industry. When enterprising
publisher Max Gaines realised that cheap, affordable, stand-alone
digests of popular newspaper strips would sell in big numbers, the
‘comic book’ was born.
In 1938, the arrival of Superman in the pages of Action comics
(Batman would follow just a year later) marked the beginning of a
major boom for the US comics industry. As Paul Gravett suggests,
during the 1940s the black-and-white moral universes occupied by the
nation’s superheroes ‘filled the modern pantheon that could answer
an anxious public’s longing for secular saviours to fight for them
against crime and injustice on the streets and against the Nazis in
the looming war in Europe’ (2005: 75). However, whilst superhero
titles were, then as now, extremely popular with readers, until the late

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1950s US comics spanned a wide range of genres. Amongst the most

popular were romance, western and war titles. Crime and horror titles
were particularly popular until the introduction of the self-censoring
‘Comics Code Authority’ in 1954.
The United Kingdom also had its own vibrant (albeit much smaller)
comics industry in the post-war era, when the likes of Eagle was
established in part to counter the perceived immorality of imported
American comics. As Gravett notes, in France and Japan ‘Bandes dess-
inées’ and ‘Manga’ had long achieved a level of critical respectability
that it would take British and American comics decades to achieve.
Well into the 1980s, the format was widely considered to be an inher-
ently juvenile one in the US and UK, a perception fuelled by the fact
that by far the most high-profile comics titles were superhero ones.
Marvel had a particularly stellar period in the 1960s, during which
many of the company’s most famous superheroes were created by their
‘bullpen’ of writers and artists (the most famous of whom included
writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby). However, by the late 1960s
there also existed a thriving adult-orientated comics counterculture.
In the UK, many of the most significant comics creators of the 1980s
and 1990s – including Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, Neil Gaiman and
Grant Morrison − got their big break working for the unabashedly
violent and satirical science fiction comic 2000AD. The so-called
‘British invasion’ of the US comics scene in the late 1980s dramatically
changed the industry, and imprints such as DC’s ‘Vertigo’ line began
to target the more ‘mature’ reader. During the mid-1980s, revisionist
superhero epics such as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen
(1986) and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986)
helped reconfigure reader and critical expectations of the medium. At
around the same time, the critical acclaim afforded the likes of Art
Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus (1980–91) helped establish the
‘graphic novel’ as a distinct commercial category.
Up until the early to mid-1980s, the descriptor ‘graphic novel’ was
not widely used, even though publisher Richard Kyle coined the term
in 1964 (Gravett 2005: 8). What that term actually means, and how
the ‘graphic novel’ is supposedly different from the ‘comic book’ is
still a matter of intense debate. Generally speaking, it is usually sug-
gested that the ‘graphic novel’ represents a more ambitious, sophisti-
cated and unified narrative than the supposedly more ‘juvenile’ comic
book, although some writers and artists feel that this definition is
more indicative of ‘highbrow’ snobbery towards comics readers and

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creators. Whether or not one believes that there is an inherent differ-

ence between the ‘comic book’ and the ‘graphic novel’, however, it
cannot be denied that increased critical respect for the medium has
helped create a climate where writers and artists can explore a wide
range of generic and thematic interests in their work. Although super-
hero titles still dominate the market, since 2000 there have also been
high-profile science fiction, horror, noir and fantasy comic releases, as
well as acclaimed works of memoir and political reportage. As with
every other kind of popular fiction, the advent of digital publishing
been a game changer for the industry: comics can now be instantly
downloaded at any time using apps such as Comixology, a develop-
ment that appears to be attracting more female readers in particular.

Bibliography
Christiansen, Hans-Christian and Anne Magnusson (eds) (2000), Comics and
Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, Copenhagen:
Museum Tusculanum Press.
Gravett, Paul (2005), Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life, London:
Aurum Press.
Harvey, Robert C. (2009), ‘How Comics Came to Be’, in J. Heer and
K. Worcester (eds), A Comic Studies Reader, Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, pp. 25–45.
Jones, Gerard (2004), Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of
the Comic Book, London: Random House.
McCloud, Scott (1993), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York:
HarperCollins.
Morrison, Grant (2012), Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero,
London: Vintage.
Sabin, Roger (2001), Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of
Comic Art, London: Phaidon.

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 Fifteen Key Works of
Contemporary Popular Fiction

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown, 2003)

Dan Brown’s conspiracy thriller made him one of the most commer-
cially successful popular fiction writers of the twenty-first century.
The novel revolves around dashing Harvard ‘Symbologist’ Robert
Langdon’s bid to unravel a murder mystery that involves art history,
the Vatican, various cloak-and-dagger organisations and the secret
descendants of Jesus Christ. Brown’s distinctive (and often parodied)
prose style is characterised by short, punchy chapters full of dra-
matic incident, unlikely plot developments and frequent cliff-hangers.
His controversial depiction of the Catholic Church and a high-profile
court case during which Brown was accused of breaching copyright
by appropriating elements of an earlier work of historical non-­fiction
only added to the novel’s already enormous sales and cultural ubiq-
uity. (Brown won the case.) Brown’s most-recent novel, Inferno,
which, like Angels and Demons (2000) and The Lost Symbol (2009),
again features Robert Langdon, was the best-selling book of 2013.

2. Let the Right One In / Låt Den Rätte Komma In

(John Ajvide Lindqvist, 2004)
Swedish author Lindqvist’s melancholy, resolutely gritty novel – in
which a beguiling vampire named Eli who looks 12, but has, she
admits, been so, ‘for a very long time’ moves in next door to a lonely
and bullied young boy named Oskar in the run-down suburbs of
1980s Stockholm – is widely considered to be one of the finest horror
novels of recent years. In Let the Right One In, as in his more recent
novels, Handing the Undead (2005), Harbour (2008) and Little Star
(2011), Lindqvist reconfigures familiar genre tropes in a manner that
acknowledges his obvious debt to authors such as Stephen King, but
still has a distinctively Scandinavian sensibility. The novel has already

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been filmed twice: first as an internationally acclaimed Swedish ver-

sion of the same name (2008) and then as an interesting but much less
critically successful American remake (Let Me In, 2010).

3. The Twilight Saga (Stephenie Meyer, 2005–8)

Meyer’s heady tale of the forbidden (and initially chaste) love that
springs up between tormented vampire Edward Cullen (a brooding
perpetual teenager who has been in high school for many decades)
and clumsy, down-to-earth new-girl-in-town Bella Swan, remains one
of the major publishing success stories of the post-2000 era. Twilight
and its sequels resonated hugely with both their initial target teen-girl
audience as well as many older female readers, who fiercely identified
with the ups and downs of the lead couple’s relationship, and famously
divided themselves into ‘Team Edward’ and ‘Team Jacob’. The success
of the series, as well as its high-profile film adaptations, also lent a
substantial boost to the popularity of the Paranormal Romance sub-
genre, which has been one of the most significant twenty-first century
publishing trends. More recently, Meyer’s series inspired E. L. James
to write the fanfiction that evolved into 50 Shades of Grey (2011).

4. The Millennium Trilogy (Stieg Larsson, 2005–7)

In the first volume of Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, dogged investiga-
tive journalist Mikael Blomkvist finds himself opposed to corrupt
and powerful men whose seeming impunity undermines perceptions
that post-war Sweden is an inherently egalitarian social democracy.
Initially published in Swedish as Män Som Hatar Kvinnor / Men Who
Hate Women (a title which emphasised Larsson’s explicitly feminist
intentions much more than the more obviously ‘commercial’ English-
language title, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), the first novel in
the Millennium series also introduced readers to the unforgettable
figure of Lisbeth Salander. The bisexual, tattoo-bedecked, troubled
young hacker rapidly became one of the most beloved characters in
contemporary popular fiction. By 2015, the trilogy had sold around
75 million copies. Larsson’s series helped kick the so-called ‘Nordic
Noir’ publishing trend into high gear, and also contributed to the
current crop of pop culture detective figures whose likely placement
somewhere on the autistic/Asperger’s spectrum is supposed to con-
tribute to their investigative prowess. A fourth instalment in the series,

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 FIFTEEN KEY WORKS  133

published as The Girl in the Spider’s Web in English, and written by

David Lagercrantz, was released in 2015 to generally good reviews
and sales of 200,000 in the first week of release alone.

5. World War Z (Max Brooks, 2006)

Brooks had previously written the tongue-in-cheek Zombie Survival
Guide (2003) before turning his hand to this rather more serious take
on the walking dead. His stroke of genius in World War Z is to use
real-life historian Studs Terkel’s ‘The Good War’: An Oral History
of World War Two (1984) as the template for his panoramic account
of a devastating ‘Zombie War’ which almost wipes out humankind.
Despite the obviously sensational premise, World War Z is a care-
fully written and thought-provoking exploration of the ways in which
sudden catastrophe can violently upend the lives and assumptions of
even the most privileged sectors of society. The success of the novel
also played a key role in facilitating the recent emergence of ‘Zombie
Lit’ as a distinct publishing category. Largely confined to celluloid
before 2000, zombies now populate the pages of countless popular
novels, as well as high-profile TV shows, comics and video games.

6. A Song of Ice and Fire Series (George R. R. Martin, 1996–)

Martin’s series, a gritty secondary-world fantasy about rival factions
battling for political and military supremacy in the quasi-medieval
setting of the land of Westeros, had already achieved considerable suc-
cess and secured a significant fan base when the first episode of the TV
adaptation, Game of Thrones, debuted on HBO in 2011. However,
within weeks of the first broadcast, it had become one of the most pop-
ular television shows in the world. Martin’s series is considered a key
work in the ‘Grimdark’ fantasy movement, a morally complex, mature
riposte to what proponents tend to see as the often overly romanticised
forms of heroic fantasy inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien. Martin’s fiction
has changed popular perceptions of heroic fantasy, and significantly
widened the themes and subject matters it can encompass, even if some
sections of his ardent fan base have of late expressed frustration at the
ever-increasing wait between new instalments of the series. Martin is
also a respected horror and SF author.

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7. The Harry Potter Series (J. K. Rowling, 1997–2007)

The huge adult audience that Rowling’s tale of a boy wizard with a
heroic destiny attracted helped make her seven-volume Harry Potter
series one of the most important influences in contemporary publish-
ing. By the time of publication of the final instalment in 2007, it
was predicted that teenage and young adult readers would outstrip
the number of child readers, in part because those who had started
reading the series in 1997 had literally grown up with the series.
Rowling’s work also helped convince fully grown-up readers that it
was perfectly acceptable to read fiction targeted at a YA/children’s
audience, a trend that has had major implications for the contempo-
rary publishing industry: by 2015, Publisher’s Weekly was citing the
results of a Nielsen survey which showed that 80 per cent of YA titles
were being bought by adults. The series may be concluded (for now)
in novel form, but at the time of writing, the Potter juggernaut shows
no sign of slowing down. In 2016, a film prequel scripted by Rowling,
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, was released, and a two-
part sequel, a stage play based on a story by Rowling, Harry Potter
and the Cursed Child, debuted in the West End.

8. The Hunger Games Trilogy (Suzanne A. Collins 2008–10)

Collins’s gripping and often genuinely grim YA hit took the standard
dystopian fiction plot – a heroic individual reluctantly battles against
a repressive and seemingly unassailable regime – and reconfigured it
for the post 9/11 generation. Youngsters living in Panem, the deeply
divided nation built amidst the ruins of what was once the United
States, are sacrificed for the entertainment of the masses. Their carefully
choreographed suffering is also a means for the tyrannical President
Snow to quell discontent amongst the oppressed majority who live
in poverty and fear. The series, as Collins has frequently noted, was
inspired by a mish-mash of Greek mythology, the Iraq War and reality
television. Her notably unsentimental yet uncompromisingly loyal and
courageous main character, Katniss Everdeen, soon became a feminist
icon, and the book ignited the dystopian YA fiction trend that has only
recently peaked. In 2015 it was widely reported upon when economics
professor Noreena Hertz dubbed what she called the ‘profoundly anx-
ious’ cohort of teenage girls born in Britain between 1995 and 2002
‘Generation Katniss’, because they were apparently shaped by many

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of the same anxieties regarding technology and existential threat seen

in Collins’s trilogy.

9. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Seth Grahame-Smith and Jane

Austen, 2009)
Grahame-Smith’s inspired fusion of Jane Austen and the living dead
(or ‘the dreadfuls’ as they are called here) constituted one of the most
unlikely publishing successes of the early twenty-first century, and
helped inspire a rash of other literary ‘mash-ups’ combining classic
nineteenth-century texts with (usually) supernatural horror tropes, as
well as a 2016 film adaptation. Though the literary mash-up trend has
by and large passed, novels in which Edwardian and Victorian settings
and often real-life historical figures encounter fantastical and uncanny
threats remain very popular, as evidenced by the current boom in
steampunk, and the popularity of TV shows such as Penny Dreadful
(Showtime, 2014–16).

10. Ms. Marvel (G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona)

The superhero known as Ms. Marvel (whose most famous prior incar-
nation was blonde and blue-eyed air force pilot Carol Danvers) has
been part of the Marvel universe since 1977. In 2013, however, Ms.
Marvel underwent her most interesting transformation to date when,
having acquired superpowers thanks to exposure to mutating ‘Terrigen
Mists’, irrepressible Pakistani-American teenager Kamala Khan adopts
the name and becomes the first Muslim character to headline a major
comics title. The acclaimed series focuses on Kamala’s struggle to
juggle family responsibilities, and negotiate clashing cultural expecta-
tions. The title also provides a fresh, witty and remarkably fun take
on stock superhero tropes. In doing so, the series effectively underlines
the positive benefits of increasing gender and racial diversity in popu-
lar culture, and demonstrates that consideration of these factors need
not render a narrative grimly ‘worthy’ or reductively tokenistic.

11. Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn, 2012)

Flynn’s deliciously devious psychological thriller, in which a seem-
ingly perfect marriage is revealed to be anything but, helped establish
both the so-called ‘Domestic Noir’ sub-genre (usually associated with

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female-written thrillers in which unease and drama comes from inti-

mate relationships) and, more prosaically, the now tiresome trend for
novels about grown women with the word ‘Girl’ featuring promi-
nently in the title. Few of the many authors that have followed in
Flynn’s wake, however, have her morbid black wit or ability to create
uniquely complex – and distinctively unsympathetic – female antago-
nists. Gone Girl protagonist Amy Dunne’s acerbic takedown of the
so-called ‘Cool Girl’ character type inspired a thousand think pieces
and feminist blog posts, but, characteristically, Amy herself, like
Flynn’s work more generally, is a lot more nuanced – and much more
challenging – than first appearances suggest. Flynn’s previous novels
– Sharp Objects (2006) and Dark Places (2009) also feature sardonic
female leads for whom intimate relationships (in these instances famil-
ial rather than marital) are claustrophobic, intense and potentially
deadly.

12. The Uninvited (Liz Jensen, 2012)

The emergence of so-called ‘Cli-Fi’ or ‘eco-fiction’ represents one of
the most interesting developments in popular fiction in recent years.
‘Cli-Fi’ or ‘Climate Change Fiction’ has as its most immediately reso-
nant theme the ramifications of global warming, widely considered
to be the most serious threat to our long-term survival as a species
(the forthcoming zombie apocalypse aside, of course). British author
Jensen’s novel begins with a series of violent events that initially make
it seem a rather standard ‘evil child’ horror novel, but as the plot pro-
gresses it becomes clear that The Uninvited is a much more ambitious
and, indeed, apocalyptically minded narrative in which the real horror
lies in the seemingly inescapable consequences of our own abuse of
the natural world. Like Catherine Chanter’s The Well (2015) and YA
titles such as The Carbon Diaries: 2015 (Saci Lloyd, 2009) and The
Ship (Antonia Honeywell, 2009), Jensen’s novel further illustrates
popular fiction’s unique ability to dramatise urgent contemporary
anxieties in an accessible and effective fashion.

13. The Southern Reach Trilogy (Jeff VanderMeer 2014)

The commercial success and critical acclaim afforded VanderMeer’s
nuanced, disorientating and defiantly original horror/SF/fantasy
hybrid – three short and beautifully written novels which chart the

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 FIFTEEN KEY WORKS  137

progress of bureaucratic and scientific efforts to map an alien land-

scape that has somehow colonised a coastal region of the US – marks
the point at which the emerging fantasy sub-genre known as the ‘New
Weird’ (which is associated with authors such as China Miéville)
began to achieve mainstream recognition.

14. Fifty Shades of Grey (E. L. James, 2013–15)

James’s erotic romance novel began life as Masters of the Universe,
a work of Twilight-inspired fanfiction, before she published it as a
serial on her own website. Following e-book publication by a small
Australian publishing house under the Fifty Shades title, the rights
were snapped up by Random House, and by mid-2014 the first novel
in the series had already spent a year at the top of the New York Times
bestseller list. In part thanks to the ability to purchase anonymously
offered by e-reading apps, and in part thanks to the word-of-mouth
frisson provided by the sadomasochistic practices detailed in the novels
(as well as their familiar take on the long-standing romance plots of
the ‘inexperienced virgin meets charismatic but dangerous older man’
sort), Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels became a pop culture sen-
sation, and helped make female-targeted erotic fiction a mainstream
publishing phenomenon. The Fifty Shades series (which consists of
four books at the time of writing) has now sold well over 100 million
copies worldwide. The 2015 screen adaptation was critically panned
but attracted very large (and again, mainly female) audiences, and the
sequel will be released in 2017.

15. The Martian (Andy Weir, 2014)

This absorbing (and often very funny) tale of a resourceful astronaut
accidentally left stranded on the red planet was initially provided for
free download by author Andy Weir on his personal website, before
he made it available for sale through Amazon Kindle direct. It was
soon one of the site’s top science fiction bestsellers, and in 2014 was
republished in hard copy by Crown, where it became a major inter-
national success. Weir’s journey from self-publishing experimentation
to mainstream publishing success is one that is becoming increasingly
common, as the experiences of writers such as E. L. James, Amanda
Hocking, Hugh Howey, Anna Todd and Cassandra Clare attest.
Self-publishing provides a means for aspiring authors to build their

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own audience, and prove the worth of their ideas, without having to
approach the traditional publishing gatekeepers first. It is no wonder
then that more ‘traditional’ publishers now keep a close eye on self-
published titles that attract a wide audience, with a view to purchas-
ing the rights for themselves. Weir’s success, like that of E. L. James,
provides further evidence that the future of popular fiction publishing
will, ever more frequently, involve making content available over a
wide range of digital platforms and formats, as well as in hard copy.

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 Chronology of Selected Key Dates
in Popular Fiction
1764 Publication of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, which
provided a blueprint for the classic European gothic novel.
1773 The first collected edition of true crime stories printed under
the title The Newgate Calendar is published.
1791 Publication of Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson, one of
the first major American bestsellers.
1798 Publication of Wieland, Or: The Transformation, An American
Tale, by Charles Brockden Brown, the first major American
gothic novel.
1813 First publication of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen.
1818 Publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern
Prometheus, a ground-breaking fusion of gothic and proto-
science fiction elements.
1826 Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers, is published.
1841 Publication of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ by Edgar
Allan Poe, which is now recognised as an important precursor
to the modern tale of detection.
1846 Publication of first instalment one of the earliest major seri-
alised ‘Penny Dreadfuls’, Sweeney Todd, by James Malcolm
Rhymer and Thomas Peckett Prest.
1852 Publication of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by
Harriet Beecher Stowe, the best-selling novel of the nineteenth
century.
1860 Establishment in the US of Beadle’s Dime Novels – the first
wave of cheap, mass-produced paperbacks produced by a so-
called ‘fiction writing factory’.

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1862 Hugely popular ‘sensation’ novel Lady Audley’s Secret by

Mary Elizabeth Braddon is published.
1868 Publication of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, which helped
establish a prototype for the British detective fiction novel.
1869 Publication of Matthew Arnold’s essay collection Culture and
Anarchy.
1870 The Elementary Education Act provides for the first time for
the mass education of working-class children in Britain, and in
doing so helps greatly expand the potential reading audience.
1887 First appearance of Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
A Study in Scarlet.
1895 America’s first bestseller list appears in the journal The
Bookman.
1897 Irish author Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published.
1897 The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, one of the most influ-
ential science fiction stories ever written, appears for the first
time in serial form.
1900 The Net Book Agreement, an arrangement between British
publishers and booksellers that established fixed pricing for
books, and established that they could not be sold to the
consumer for less than the officially agreed sum, comes into
effect.
1906 The Stratemeyer Syndicate, founded by prolific writer and
publisher Edward Stratemeyer, which will dominate children’s
publishing in the US for decades, is established.
1920 Publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the debut novel
of future ‘Queen of Crime’ Agatha Christie.
First issue of the highly influential pulp magazine Black Mask
is published.
1923 Establishment of Weird Tales, a pulp magazine specialising in
tales of fantasy and horror soon associated with authors such
as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.
1926 The Book-of-the-Month club is founded in the US.

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 CHRONOLOGY  141

Publisher and editor Hugo Gernsback establishes the first

magazine dedicated to the genre of science fiction, Amazing
Stories.
1930 Publication of F. R. Leavis’s pamphlet ‘Mass Civilisation and
Minority Culture’.
1931 The New York Times bestseller list appears for the first time.
1932 Publication of Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public.
1935 The first ever audiobook, a gramophone recording of Agatha
Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is released in the
UK.
Penguin Books is founded by publisher Allen Lane.
1937 Superman makes his debut in Action Comics first ever issue.
1938 Publication of the best-selling gothic mystery Rebecca, by
Daphne du Maurier.
1939 Establishment of Pocket Books, which will soon be at the fore-
front of the mass-market publishing boom in the US.
1944 First publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in which the term ‘cul-
ture industry’ is coined (it was published in revised form in
1947).
Kathleen Winsor’s hugely successful historical romance
Forever Amber is published.
1949 Harlequin, which will later become the most important
publisher of romance fiction in the world, is established in
Winnipeg, Canada.
1952 Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale introduces the world to suave
super-spy James Bond.
1954 The first volume of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
epic fantasy trilogy The Fellowship of the Ring, is published.
The US Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency meets
to discuss the allegedly dangerous impact of crime and horror
comics titles on their young readers. A self-regulating ‘Comics
Code’ is adopted by the industry.

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1956 Debut novelist Grace Metalious’s small-town potboiler Peyton

Place is a publishing sensation.
1964 The term ‘graphic novel’ is coined by publisher Richard Kyle.
The so-called ‘Birmingham School’ of Cultural Studies is estab-
lished in the UK.
1966 The lurid melodrama Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann,
becomes one of the most-talked about ‘blockbusters’ of all
time. Susann becomes the first author to have three books in a
row grab the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list.
1967 The horror novel Rosemary’s Baby, by Ira Levin, is published,
and helps create the horror-publishing boom of the 1970s and
1980s.
1974 Horror author Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie,
appears.
The Sunday Times bestseller list is established in the UK.
1983 The Colour of Magic, British fantasy author Terry Pratchett’s
first instalment in the long-running Discworld series, is
published.
1984 Thomas Harris’s police procedural/psychological horror novel
Red Dragon is published, marking the first appearance of the
soon-to-be-iconic serial killer Hannibal Lecter.
1986 The first issue of revisionist superhero comic Watchmen, writ-
ten by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, is published
by DC comics.
1995 The online book retailing website Amazon.com is launched.
1996 The ‘Oprah’s Book Club’ slot debuts on The Oprah Winfrey
Show.
UK journalist Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary is pub-
lished, and helps establish the ‘Chick-Lit’ sub-genre of romance
fiction as a major publishing category.
The first volume of SF/fantasy author George R. R. Martin’s
epic A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Game of Thrones, is
published.

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 CHRONOLOGY  143

1997 The Net Book Agreement collapses, ushering in a period

of radical restructuring for the publishing industry and
for booksellers in the UK, as well as lower prices for
consumers.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J. K. Rowling, is
published in the UK. It will be released a year later in the US as
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
2000 Stephen King’s novella Riding the Bullet becomes the first
mass-market e-book.
2003 Dan Brown’s immensely popular conspiracy thriller The Da
Vinci Code is published.
The first novel designed to be read on a mobile/cell phone is
published in Japan.
2005 The first volume in Stephenie Meyer’s YA paranormal romance
series Twilight is published.
The first instalment in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, Män
Som Hatar Kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women) is posthumously
published in his native Sweden.
2006 Self-publishing app Wattpad is launched. As of 2016, it has up
to 40 million unique users a month.
2007 The online user-generated book review and recommendation
site Goodreads is launched.
Amazon’s portable e-reading device, the Kindle, goes on sale,
enabling users to digitally download books instantly from the
company’s website. By 2014, Amazon controlled 65 per cent
of the e-book market.
Kindle Direct Publishing, which allows authors/publishers to
upload their own publications to the Amazon store for pur-
chase on Kindle and Kindle apps, is launched.
2008 Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games helps prompt a boom in
dystopian YA fiction.
2009 The satirical ‘mash-up’ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by
Seth Grahame-Smith and Jane Austen, inspires a multitude of
sequels and imitators.

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 144  KEY CONCEPTS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR FICTION

2009 The so-called ‘Slender Man’ is created by ‘Victor Surge’ (aka

Eric Knudsen) and rapidly becomes a subject of countless
‘Creepypasta’ stories, photo-shopped images, forum postings
and YouTube videos.
US book chain Barnes & Noble launches its ‘NOOK’ e-reader.
The term ‘New Adult Fiction’ is coined by St Martin’s Press.
2010 Google Books is launched.
2011 US book chain Borders declares bankruptcy.
Erotic romance novel Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James,
becomes a publishing sensation.
Fantasy/paranormal romance author Amanda Hocking, who
had sold one million copies of her self-published fiction (mainly
in e-book format) to that date, secures a publishing contract
with St Martin’s Press.
E-book sales are added to the New York Times fiction and
non-fiction lists for the first time.
Fortune magazine reports that 20 million e-readers were sold
in the US during this year.
According to Forbes, sales of the Kindle reach 13.44 million
in 2011. Amazon.com announces that e-book sales have over-
taken those of paperbacks for the first time.
2012 Gillian Flynn’s psychological thriller Gone Girl becomes a
major hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and helps establish
‘Domestic Noir’ as a significant publication category.
The term ‘Cli-Fi’ (‘Climate Change Fiction’) enters the
mainstream.
2013 The Bowker research group reports that the number of self-
published titles has increased five-fold in five years.
2014 The ‘We Need Diverse Books’ campaign is founded in the US.
2015 Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body
Problem wins the Hugo Award for best novel. The awards are
dogged by controversy surrounding supposedly rigged ballots
caused by a vocal group of fans and publishers opposed to

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 CHRONOLOGY  145

what they see as the excessive attention paid to issues of race,

gender and representation in recent years, the so-called ‘Sad
Puppies’.
The Association of American Publishers reports a 10 per cent
drop in digital sales during 2015, according to Publisher’s
Weekly.
Resurgent UK book chain Waterstones announces that Kindle
e-readers will no longer be sold in their stores. It is widely
reported that dedicated e-reader sales have dramatically
declined in both the UK and the US, in part because of the
ubiquity of tablets and smartphones, in addition to higher
priced e-books.
Nielsen BookScan reports that e-book sales in the US consti-
tute a 25 per cent market share of total book sales.
Amazon opens its first bricks-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle,
amidst media speculation that it will be the first of many.
It is reported that digital audiobooks now represent one of the
fastest growing areas of the publishing industry.
2016 Amazon launches the ‘Oasis’, their smallest and lightest
e-reader to date.

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