Kim Wilkins

The Romantic ideal of creativity elaborated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his introduction to 'Kubla Khan' (1816), in which he extols such experiences as solitude, inspiration, and an almost transcendental dissociation from the mundanity of everyday life, remains present in the contemporary consciousness as part of a shared mythology of creative practice. Rather than focussing on the psychological frameworks by which creativity is believed to be constituted, this essay centralises the material relations of creative practice, with particular attention paid to the experiences of creative writing time revealed in interviews with contemporary Australian novelists Isobelle Carmody, Kate Forsyth, and Lee Battersby. Drawing upon recent theories about the sociomateriality and cooperative frameworks of creativity, and Rita Felski's elaboration of heterogeneous temporalities, this essay explores the possibility of understanding creativity in the field of writing not in terms of existence within or without the experiential boundaries of the Romantic ideal, but rather in terms of its operation within matrices of temporal relations that encompass the sublime and mundane, individual and collective, asynchronous and synchronous, creative and commercial.

This article presents a study of a model of textual production that situates genre fiction, specifically fantasy fiction, within its community and industry contexts. I argue that Australian fantasy 'fandom' operates in some ways like a research and development space for the literature it consumes, through allowing, enabling and enthusiastically supporting – both ethically and materially – a thriving small press culture. Fandom is known for its passionate investments in texts, and those investments are rarely passive. The fantasy genre community is already oriented towards prosumption, and small presses afford specific opportunities for writers to work in specific ways, enriching and developing their individual craft and the genre as a whole. The least interesting questions about genre fiction are questions of how to define it or defend it. Beyond supplying a succinct working description, taxonomy is a critical cul de sac, and arguing for genre fiction's value or otherwise in relation to capital-L 'Literature' has increasingly become Internet click-bait, where arguments are staged between genre authors, on one hand (such as Jennifer Weiner (via Twitter)) and Lev Grossman (Grossman, 2012), and literary critics, on the other (Beha, 2013; Krystal, 2012), and nobody's mind is changed. These questions lapse inevitably into arguments about what fiction should be as though literature has static definitions and value. Far more interesting, dynamic and responsive are questions about what fiction observably does. Genre fiction's relationship to the marketplace has been repeatedly overstated: people do more with books than simply buying them; they do more than simply reading them too. The passionate investments of genre readers have not been sufficiently accounted for, even though they are dynamic and productive. This article presents a study of a model of textual production that situates genre fiction, specifically fantasy fiction, within its community and industry contexts. My approach encompasses a range of sources, including publishing studies scholarship, small press publication catalogues, awards listings, observations at fantasy community conventions

The trope of forced sex in romance fiction has found itself under scrutiny and pressure since the feminist movement, and even more so now as women's media, especially e-media and social media, grow increasingly concerned with what is called "rape culture". A thriving subgenre of romance fiction is the Viking-themed romance, a paranormal-inflected subgenre that invariably features non-consensual sex (" ravishment "). My contention is that the Viking in these romance novels is a symbol of the pre-modern, allowed to be a brutal dominator precisely because he is freed from the restrictions of rational modernity. Moreover, the persistence of the paranormal in these stories marks them as clearly existing outside the general consensus of reality. Socially unacceptable behaviour becomes reframed as part of a fantasy, pre-emptively defusing any criticism that the acts of rape within are meaningful in a contemporary real-world context. The genre of Viking romance fiction, then, creates a more comfortable space for these stories by projecting rape into the past, and obscuring it with the veil of the numinous. Ravishment is accepted more readily when it is represented within a context that is neither "modern" nor "normal": rather, it is pre-modern and paranormal. The genre uses a number of observable moves, related to the pre-modern and the paranormal, to manage the transformation of a potentially guilty reading pleasure into a less-encumbered reading pleasure.