Popular Culture: Literature

The first book to assess critically mystery in children's literature, this collection charts a development from religious mystery through rationally solved detective fictions to insoluble supernatural and horror mysteries. Written by internationally recognized scholars in the field, these thirteen original essays offer challenging and innovative readings of both classic and popular mysteries for children.

In addition to the essays on specific authors, fourteen articles address wide-ranging types of mysteries, including the armchair detective, the black detective, the female detective, the gay and lesbian mystery, the legal crime novel, the police procedural, the religious mystery, the romantic suspense novel, and the spy thriller.

In his provocative, caustic, and often hilarious survey of today's popular fiction, Anderson shows us who the best thriller writers are - and the worst. He shows how Michael Connelly was inspired by Raymond Chandler, how George Pelecanos toiled in obscurity while he mastered his craft, how Sue Grafton created the first great woman private eye, and how Thomas Harris transformed an insane cannibal into the charming man of the world who made FBI agent Clarice Starling his lover.

This collection of essays focuses on the girl sleuth, made famous by Nancy Drew but also characterized by other famous detectives like Cherry Ames, Trixie Belden, Linda Carlton, and even in contemporary media by Veronica Mars and Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter series.

Fantasy literature is often regarded as formally schematic and predictable. In this book, Lykke Guanio-Uluru demonstrates that even as popular fantasy texts like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Twilight share common structures and tropes, they put these tropes to highly diverse ethical uses.

In this wide-ranging series of essays, an award-winning science fiction critic explores how the related genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror evolve, merge, and finally evaporate into new and more dynamic forms. The essays cover a vast range of authors and texts, and include substantial discussions of very current fiction published within the last few years.

A multinational perspective runs through this volume, which focuses on dynamic trends in feminist science fiction. The contributions include discussions of such issues as race, gender, cyberfeminism, the media, and new writers in the field.

Once a small subculture, the steampunk phenomenon exploded in visibility during the first years of the twenty-first century. From its Victorian and literary roots to film and television, video games, music, and even fashion, this subgenre of science fiction reaches far and wide within current culture. Here Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall present cutting-edge essays on steampunk: its rise in popularity, its many manifestations, and why we should pay attention.

This work argues that animal fables were essential sources of amusement and instruction-and were also often profoundly unsettling. Such authors in the realm of the animal fable as Tolkien, Freud, Voltaire, Bakhtin, Cordwainer Smith, Karel, Vladimir Propp, and many more are discussed.

This book explores the mechanics of contemporary romantic fiction, but in a way that reveals the real reader as an active, culturally competent subject. In its analysis, it shows that the genre borrows the narrative elements of the realist bourgeois novel--the conventions of time, place and individual characterization--but appropriates them in such a way as to redeploy them within a pre-ordained and constant narrative constantly oscillates between experience and thought of what bourgeois society promised women and invariably failed to provide.

Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It consistently maintains the largest market share in the American publishing industry, even as it welcomes new subgenres like queer and BDSM romance. Digital publishing originated in erotic romance, and savvy online communities have exploded myths about the genre's readership. Romance scholarship now reflects this diversity, transformed by interdisciplinary scrutiny, new critical approaches, and an unprecedented international dialogue between authors, scholars, and fans. These eighteen essays investigate individual romance novels, authors, and websites, rethink the genre's history, and explore its interplay of convention and originality.

Rethinking the Romance Genre examines why the romance genre has proven such an irresistible form for contemporary writers and filmmakers as they approach global issues. In contemporary texts ranging from literary works, to films, to social media, romance facilitates a range of intimacies that offer new feminist models in the age of globalization.

Romance and the Erotics of Property examines contemporary popular romance from a number of different points of view, probing for codes and subtexts that sometimes exploit and sometimes contradict its surface tale of romantic attraction, frustration, longing, and fulfillment. It sets romance fiction against a historic and literary background, arguing that contemporary romance disguises as tales of love the subversive fantasies of female appropriation and male property and power.