Popular Fiction

This article addresses the recent attempts to integrate evolutionary history in the US national narrative. Focusing on the cultural, legal, and scientific controversy over Kennewick Man, the ancient human remains discovered in Washington state in 1996, the article explores the narrative politics of American national belonging. Through a popular historical novel on Kennewick Man's life, the article further theorizes nostalgia as a narrative tool in imagining the evolutionary origins of the nation. The article argues that nostalgia produces a temporal dynamic that bridges the gap between national history and global prehistory, and that this dynamic is reinforced through cultural ideas of genetic knowledge. At the same time, prehistoric nostalgia renders problematic ideas of ethnic difference largely invisible.

Marginalia is a multilingual bibliographic bulletin (format PDF) of international secondary sources about popular fiction and films : science-fiction & fantasy, fantasic and gothic fiction, horror, spy stories, comics and animation, westerns, war stories and films, erotica, historical novels and films, adventures, children’s Literature (free 4 issues yearly, available on demand).
Contact: Norbert Spehner : nspehner@sympatico.ca

This dissertation tackles one central problem: What were the intellectual and social origins of New Order Indonesia (1966-1998)? The analytical lens that this study employs to examine this society is the Indonesian middling classes’ pursuit of modernity. The dissertation comes in two parts. Part One reconstructs the evolution of the Indonesian middling classes and their search for progress. Part Two uses three case studies to analyze the middling classes’ search for Indonesian modernity under the New Order. The first explores the top-down modernization undertaken by President Soeharto’s assistants at the National Development Planning Board, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology. The second case study investigates the “bottom-up” modernization performed by the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information. The third case study deals with how several authors used popular fiction to criticize the kind of Indonesian modernity that emerged in the New Order era. This research yields several findings. First, the Indonesian middling classes championed a pragmatic, structural-functional path to modernity. Second, to modernize the country rapidly and safely, the modernizers proceeded in an eclectic and pragmatic manner. Third, between the Old and the New Order, there existed strong continuity in ideas, ideals, skills, and problems. Fourth, the middling classes’ modernizing mission was fraught with contradictions, naïvetés, ironies, and violence, which had roots in the nationalist movement in the first half of the twentieth century. The New Order was neither wholly new nor an aberration from the “normal” trajectory of Indonesia’s contemporary history. The sort of modernity that the Indonesian middling classes ended up creating was Janus-faced.

In this paper, we use a corpus stylistic methodology to investigate whether serious (i.e., ‘literary’) fiction is syntactically more complex than popular (i.e., ‘genre’) fiction. This is on the basis of literary critical claims that the structural complexity of serious fiction is one of the features that distinguishes it from popular literature (which, by contrast, is seen as easier to read). We compare the serious and popular fiction sections of the Lancaster Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation corpus (see Semino and Short, 2004 ) against various samples of the British National Corpus available in Wmatrix ( Rayson, 2009 ), focussing particularly (though not exclusively) on the identification of subordinating conjunctions. We find that, on this measure, there is no basis for claiming that serious fiction is any more complex syntactically than popular fiction. We then investigate the issue in relation to a specific genre of popular fiction, Chick Lit. Here we find that while syn...

This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres. It re-evaluates the traditional view that the sidekick character in these genres is often overlooked as having a small, generic or singular role—either to act as the foil to the detective in order to accentuate their own abilities at solving crimes, or else to simply tell the story to the reader. Instead, essays in the collection explore the representations and functions of the detective’s sidekick across a range of forms and subgenres of crime fiction. By incorporating forms such as children’s detective fiction, comics and graphic novels and film and television alongside the more traditional fare of novels and short stories, this book aims to break down the boundaries that sometimes exist between these forms, using the sidekick as a defining thread to link them together into a wider conceptual argument that covers a broad range of crime narratives.

The lack of local literature bedevilled African and Nigerian literatures for a long time. This contributed in no small measure to a few critics averring that Africa and Nigeria lack literature of any major type especially of the traditional form. The twentieth century Onitsha Market Literature in Nigeria which came in pamphlets, novellas, and chap-books is just an example to disprove this assertion. Within this traditional but regional literature is a compilation of oral literary sourced works and documented solutions to modern life issues. It is a potpourri of life experiences of Nigerians within the colonial and post-colonial life. This paper, through pedagogical and bibliographical modes, situates the development and effect of this onerous popular fictional phenomenon as a relevant precursor to the origin and development of not only present day Nigerian Literature but also to a large extent, to the Anglophone West African Literature.

This article explores the use of the police officer in both periodical journalism and cheap, mass-produced "police memoir" fiction from the mid-nineteenth century. It highlights how police officers were inserted into writing that was concerned with urban growth and urban criminality and argues that they helped journalists, authors and readers to map, experience, understand and criticise the growth of the metropolis. The police officer was originally seen to be a protective figure for journalists delving into spaces deemed criminal, and writing about crime for readers' interest. Across the early-to-mid nineteenth century, social exploration articles appeared frequently in periodicals. The authors were reliant on the police for access to a multitude of criminal spaces that emerged as the city grew. Thus, the police officer's rise was connected to the city, and the police themselves formed a part of the urban environment, with the power to observe, explore and influence it. The presence of the police officer in journalism led to developments in other kinds of writing, including fiction. The power of the police to reveal hidden or latent criminality in the urban space was actively used in a variety of ways to create new, cheap and popular forms of fiction.

Author Mira Grant takes her readers on a mad scientist and his creature horror adventure in this modern take on how science can go too far. But, what elements of this ring true to the themes of the classic Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly and how does Grant take her story to further depths of reality?

This book explores literary and Egyptological cultures from the closing decades of the nineteenth century to the opening decades of the twentieth, culminating in the aftermath of the high-profile discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. Analysing the works of Egyptologists including Howard Carter, Arthur Weigall and E. A. Wallis Budge alongside those of their literary contemporaries such as H. Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli and Oscar Wilde, it investigates the textual, cultural and material exchanges between literature, Egyptology and visual and material culture across this period.

“Your mother Harry, she sacrificed herself for you, and that kind of act leaves a mark. This kind of mark cannot be seen. It lives in your very skin. It is love Harry, love. It is the one thing Voldemort cannot understand.”, says Dumbledore to Harry.

The Dirk Gently series written by Douglas Adams mixes comedy, detective fiction and science fiction to create narratives capable of conveying ecological meaning in a variety of ways. Using ecocritical theory this thesis unpacks the ecological themes and implications of the Dirk
Gently series; ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ (1987), ‘The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul’, (1988) and the unfinished and posthumously published ‘The Salmon of Doubt’ (2002). This thesis demonstrates how science fiction elements such as time travel and aliens can facilitate the understanding of ecological issues. Through socio-political approaches to ecocritical theory the implications of Adams’ indictment of neo-colonialism and modernity are to be a threat to the biosphere and humans as a part of it. The blind wastefulness of the human era or Anthropocene is evident in the Dirk Gently series as Dirk’s world becomes increasingly cluttered by rubbish and debris, some of it sentient. As an advocate for endangered species the environmentally aware Adams, through the adventures of ‘holistic’ detective Dirk Gently, offers a glimpse into the vast interconnected web of the biosphere and the immeasurable impact of humans on the ecological welfare of the planet.

While popular fiction has been amply discussed by literary critics and cultural studies scholars, the language of popular fiction has been relatively under-researched. Recent work in stylistics (see, for example, Mahlberg and McIntyre 2011, Montoro 2012) has begun to build on early studies by scholars such as Nash (1990). I investigate the commonly held assumption that writers of popular fiction are less linguistically versatile than literary authors and that this is likely to be reflected in the syntactic structures of their writing. Elsewhere, Montoro and McIntyre (2019) have tested this hypothesis by looking at subordinating conjunctions as markers of complexity and by considering whether these are more prevalent in serious fiction than in popular fiction. Montoro and McIntyre (2019) conclude that serious fiction cannot be said to be more syntactically complex on the basis of that measure alone; instead, syntactic complexity appears to be realised at phrasal rather than clausal level. In this paper, I further that investigation by analysing two corpora which prototypically illustrate genres associated with popular fiction: Chick Lit and Vampire literature. I expand the analysis by Montoro ad McIntyre (2019) and focus on the Noun Phrase to further test the premise that syntactic complexity works at phrasal rather than at clausal level.

This volume moves the debate about literature and geography in a new direction by showing the significance of spatial settings in the enormous and complex field of popular fiction. Approaching popular genres as complicated systems of meaning, the collected essays model key theoretical and critical approaches for interrogating the meaning of space and place across diverse genres, including crime, thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, and romance. Including topics such as classic English ghost stories, blockbuster Antarctic thrillers, prize-winning Montreal crime fiction, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and China Miéville’s Bas-Lag, among others, this book brings together analyses of the real-and-imagined settings of some of the most widely read authors and texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to show how they have an immeasurable impact on our spatial awareness and imagination.

Many children’s fantasy novels include scenes in which the protagonists leave the safety of their homes and cross over into unknown fantasy worlds. It could be argued that the whole premise is based on the phenomenon of escapism. In particular, this paper will explore the way in which the war circumstances of the real-world fuel the need of the child protagonists to seek out a new and better world. This will be done through a comparative analysis of two novels that take place in England during the Second World War, and whose protagonists temporarily leave their homes in favour of the novels’ respective fantasy worlds: TheLion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis and The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly. The comparison will be explicated by following the proposed stages of the plots’ development: the introduction and contextualisation of the war circumstances; going over into the fantasy world; the adventure in the fantasy world and how it mirrors the real situation. The final stage encompasses the return to the ordinary world and the exploration of how the protagonists’ worldview has changed.
Relevant literary sources will be consulted to support the arguments, and historical sources will be utilised for the contextualisation of the plot and an interdisciplinary overview of the topic.

Despite the immense and lasting success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code as both a novel and a broader cultural phenomenon, few scholars have attempted to explain its very popularity. Using a cultural-historical lens, this essay argues that the success of Brown's narrative should be understood as a reflection of some of the major political themes in the post-9/11 United States: the secrecy and deceptions of the George W. Bush administration and the resulting distrust of government and flowering of conspiracy theories.

This study investigates Paulo Coelho's highly popular novel, The Alchemist (1988), in its English translation. Coelho's The Alchemist has positively influenced millions of its readers worldwide as it inspires them to pursue their dreams or their "personal legends" in their lives without being afraid of failure. Santiago's quest for his dream becomes a motivation for the readers to face challenges in their road to success in life. Coelho himself advocates for being aware of our "personal calling" which he says is "God's blessing" or, "our own dream". The current research questions the presentation of this dream by the author in this novel as it does not seem to be a simple dream. The dream is regarded as a metaphor not only by the author himself, but also by many critics who interpret this dream from a positivistic outlook to life. In this research, I would argue that this dream has its other metaphorical connotations too due to its way of presentation. Santiago's dream and its pursuit highly resemble the pursuit of American Dream, a capitalist ideology. Santiago's quest for his dream and the hidden treasure which he finds in the end has been argued as promotion of "rugged individualism" in this study. Thus, the paper, from a Marxist point of view, decodes the dream metaphor in The Alchemist, and tries to understand the operation of other capitalist ideologies in it.

Egypt has been embedded in Western consciousness for the last two centuries, and its (pre-colonial) culture has reinvigorated the European and North-American store of myth to an immeasurable extent. The essay investigates the discreet but powerful interventions of Western popular culture in translating Egypt for Western consumption, both building and resisting stereotypes.  It discusses Bram Stoker’s critically neglected Egyptian novel 'The Jewel of Seven Stars' (1903), and three popular renderings of Egypt produced around a hundred years later, which rewrite stereotypes from within: the film 'The Jewel of the Nile' (1985), the novel 'The Map of Love' (1999), and the documentary 'The Hidden History of Egypt' (2002).
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Everywhere, the Eye of Horus, the all-seeing all-controlling predatory westernised eye. Everywhere too, the resisting judeo-arabic Hamsa hand.... Western popular culture continues to produce discreet but powerful interventions translating Egypt for Western consumption, both building and resisting stereotypes, in novels, films, and TV documentaries. When they are considered through a feminist, anti-authoritarian, and postcolonial lens... these cultural interventions open up as political interventions, which aim at making audiences think, or rethink, or suspend our thinking.
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A.L.Mentxaka, “Egypt in Western Popular Culture: From Bram Stoker to The Jewel of the Nile”. 'Otherness' Journal. Vol. 6. No. 2 (Winter 2018): n.p.

O Romance é um fenômeno global, entretanto, pouco se sabe de suas leitoras e, mais especificamente, sobre o fandom de Romance. Portanto, neste artigo busco apresentar características da cultura das fãs brasileiras de Romance. Para tanto, primeiro discuto a relação de literatura culta e de massa (SODRÉ, 1988) até chegar no termo literatura pop. Em seguida apresento as definições e elementos narrativos que compõem o Romance (REGIS, 2007). E, por fim, caracterizo as fãs de Romance no Brasil através de dados coletados a partir de abordagem quanti-qualitativa (ANGROSINO, 2009; HINE, 2015). As fãs brasileiras de Romance são leitoras jovens, urbanas, com nível superior de escolaridade, engajadas, ligadas à cultura pop de forma geral e, principalmente, interessadas em histórias de amor, isto é, em enredos românticos seja qual for a mídia.

There can be little doubt that human consciousness is now suffused with narrative. In the West, narrative is the focus of a number of lucrative industries and narratives proliferate as never before. The importance of popular genres in current narrative is an index of the demise of authorship in the face of new media and has necessitated the renewal of the term ‘genre’ in narrative analysis over the last hundred years or so. However, this article attempts to make clear that the concept of genre and the notion of a textual formula in narrative are not the same thing. Genre, in contrast to formula, is concerned precisely with the issue of how audiences receive narrative conventions; however, much genre theory has treated genre as a purely textual entity. The current article argues that genre should  properly be considered as an ‘idea’ or an ‘expectation’ harboured by readers and identifies in textual-based genre theory of the last two thousand years the perpetuation of ahistoricality and canonisation.

Images of ancient Sparta are irrepressible in Western thought. A powerful model of excellence in the middle ages and Renaissance, in the Enlightenment and French Revolution Sparta was invoked by radical thinkers as a model for the creation of an ideal republic. Since the 19th century Sparta has been viewed as the opposite of liberal and industrial democracies: shunned – or hailed – as the model for 20th century totalitarian and militaristic regimes such as the Third Reich. Intelligence analysts in the United States used Sparta as an analogy to predict the performance of the Cold War Soviet Union. But positive views of the Spartans flourish in contemporary democratic culture and digital media, most strikingly in popular fiction, graphic novels and film.

This book is the first to focus exclusively on Sparta’s impact in modern times. Eleven international experts take readers across ten centuries from the 12th century Renaissance to 21st century digital culture. Exploiting hitherto untapped sources, from medieval political tracts to declassified CIA documents and YouTube video clips, they reveal many previously unknown aspects of Sparta’s impact on modern politics and culture.

Fairytales and folktales are believed to be the earliest expression of imaginative literature and arose in response to the universal human delight in listening to stories. A unique characteristic of folktales is the enjoyment derived from repetitions of the same tales. This is mirrored in child's pleasure in having the same story told over and over again. And the same expression is found among the adults reading 'popular' or 'genre' fiction. This paper will focus on the influence of Indian folktales on Indian popular fiction and the presence of intertextual relationship between them. And, a country as vast and as ancient as India, is naturally a treasure chest of such oral folktales. So, this paper will analyze the ways the themes of age old oral Indian narratives are transformed in various fictions of contemp orary times.

This book begins at the intersection of Dracula and War of the Worlds, both published in 1897 London, and describes the settings of Transylvania, Mars, and London as worlds linked by the body of the vampire. It explores the “vampire from another world” in all its various forms, as a manifestation of not just our anxieties around alien others, but also our alien selves.
Unsurprisingly, many of the tropes these novels generated and particularly the themes they have in common have been used and adapted by vampire narratives that followed. From Nosferatu to Alien, Interstellar, Stranger Things, and many others, this book examines how these narratives have evolved since the end of the nineteenth century. Bringing together texts and films from across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, from the far reaches of outer space and the distant future, it concludes that the unexpected and the unknown are not always to be feared, and that humanity does have the power to write its own future.

My paper will examine and critically analyze P.D. James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman from the feminist lens, and thereby deal with the questions on gender and sexuality as raised through the novel. Although the figure of female detective is widespread enough in detective fiction, this paper looks at ways in which the protagonist, Cordelia Gray breaks quite a few stereotypes of this genre that renders her an unconventional detective figure. The irrationality of the crime in this novel pushes the reader into inquiring about the existing gender and generic norms. The novel successfully promotes the line of argument as taken up in my paper that the novel is set in a world that does not ascribe to the conventions of Golden Age Detective fiction, rather subverts and questions them. A feminist deliberation thus springs up about the oft-cited P.D. James' title: Is detection an unsuitable job for a woman? Or does the introduction of a female detective signal a redefinition of the genre itself? My paper will be an attempt to grapple with such conundrums, that define the text and render it subversive for its times.

The saga’s readerships and the imperatives laid upon its authors by the publishing industry are also distinctive and require consideration as defining characteristics. This chapter considers the question: “What is the saga, and how do we understand the working-class saga in relation to history, literature, and writing?”

Also available for review at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitor.

We recognize myths for what they indicate about the values and beliefs of the cultures who were the authors and audiences of those myths; many of the earliest communicators of myth were telling stories about subjects they counted as people (somewhat) like themselves. Yet, despite our modern sophistication, today’s consumers of narrative still often treat fictions as though they are real, thinking and feeling people.  We are introduced to Superman, for instance, as a fiction, but circumstance often leads consumers to discursively treat that invented hero as a human subject.  Now, though, we verge on a technological future in which just such sympathies might become functionally useful. In our modern science fiction like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Westworld, we have already begun to imagine how we will come to treat our narrative inventions of tomorrow. Strange Visitor: Subjectivity, Simulation, and the Future of the First Superhero begins to ask what our actual responsibilities will become when fictions can be rendered with volition.  In its opening chapters, the text studies how we humanize a figure like Superman in our own perceptions, and how that treatment--along with his continuing narrative development--makes him a prime candidate for an experiment in complex, highly verisimilitudinous simulation.  Superman is a central point of consideration here simply because there is so much of him to consider. He may be the most content-dense fiction ever created, but the innumerable opportunities consumers have had to get to know the character mean that he is also eminently familiar.  Superman has maintained his presence in our media and discourses, across the decades, as consumer populations have continued to grow and our communications structures have commensurately evolved and expanded. Superman is the subject of this study not because he has become so popular, but because he has managed to stay that way at a particularly sharp inflection point in the history of human communications. 

But, the Man of Steel is often generalized as infallible and, therefore, rather dull.  The first part of this work--an expansive psychological assessment--troubles such a presumption, though, by examining the complex mind that has accrued within decades of narrative, across media, and which must be carefully navigated in any exhaustive analysis.  This first section also considers Superman’s relationship with his media consumers: from how we use him to form childhood bonds with one another, to how we respond to his continuing humanization.  For, Superman is powerfully determined by how audiences actually treat any given instance of the figure as Superman.  Today, we find that we can engage with particularly realistic media, encouraging us even more urgently to invest in the verisimilitude and humanity of the characters and places being presented, and doing so often makes a narrative more appealing.  Accordingly, Superman’s relationship with his own media is particularly convenient to an examination of the intersection between fictional narrative, high technology, and identity negotiation.  To understand Superman's potent humanization, the first half of this text presents an assessment of his identity from multiple essential perspectives, including those of his content creators and consumers, as well as the complex judgments of himself and his fictional society as they have been presented in his narratives. Diegetic evidence is considered in historical and psychological capacities in order to assess how Superman’s media has been constructed--practically from the beginning--to encourage consumers to invest themselves in the figure’s humanity and relatability.

In its second part, Strange Visitor moves from relevant questions of identity into a more practical application of those insights to current and emerging technologies.  We already enjoy vastly interactive ways of engaging with our fictions, and we can anticipate continuing advancements in the verisimilitude, interactability, and spontaneity of artificial intelligences.  Accordingly, fewer and fewer holes in the experiential tapestry of narrative will have to be ignored as both storytelling techniques and rendering technologies continue to evolve.  Soon, what we practically treat as a ‘human’ subject may have more to do with that figure’s specific engageability than with its biology or physical consistency.  Given the view of the detailed project proposal that constitutes the second part of this work, spontaneous, humanlike, autonomous simulations culled from fictional worlds could very well become reality within the foreseeable future.  Emerging from our science fiction dreams, several considerable, real-world technological initiatives would see us reconstruct the intellects of great thinkers, such as Gandhi, Curie, or Hawking. But, reconstructing and functionalizing the consciousness of a real person--living or dead--is an ethically dubious proposition from the start.  Instead of an original personality, though--seemingly ‘complete’ at first, but limited in contextual understanding--what if researchers built a simulated subject from the material of a robustly developed fiction?  If the first of our deep, humanlike engagements with such technology will be the most important, Superman seems a fitting choice, given how we have already embraced him on personal and cultural levels.

But, as real technologies advance toward that imagined outcome, we must also ask how the practical, livable terms of fictionality would change. How would our own responsibilities evolve as we produced and engaged with such personalities?  The prototypical solution I propose here--referred to as the Metropolis Simulation System--could be considered one of Andrew M. Butler’s necessary explorations into the role of the simulacrum (“Postmodernism and Science Fiction” 147).  Whatever of these speculations does or does not bear out, it is my hope with this text to show the reader that we must pay substantial attention to our future relationships with our media and computing technologies. Such a situation need not be feared, though, if we approach with the optimistic combination of thoughtfulness and adventurousness that a character like Superman can inspire.

Strange Visitor is intended for any who might have the interest and/or resources to help realize the rendering of a densely-developed fiction as an exemplary representative of humanlike, fully-engageable general artificial intelligence, including the developers of the many technologies referenced.  Portions of the work might also be used as an introduction into the complexities of mediated identity construction, while the critical questions presented could be utilized in advanced media studies courses, or as portions of a forward-thinking philosophy curriculum. Other segments may benefit discussions on popular fictions generally, the ethics of narrative, or psychological and identiary dynamics.

In 1891 the aspiring young Adelaide-born author Guy Boothby set sail from his native city for the wider opportunities of London. There he made his name with A Bid for Fortune (1895), an international crime thriller featuring his best-known character Dr Nikola, the title of which is most indicative of his attitude toward writing. Inspired by an earlier meeting with Rudyard Kipling in Adelaide, Boothby had come to see fiction-writing as the most promising outlet for his ambition. This paper will argue that just as Kipling’s popularity derived from his ability to mediate the Anglo-Indian experience for domestic British consumption, once in London Boothby similarly tried to construct a distinctive Anglo-Australian identity to differentiate his work in the competitive literary marketplace. His fiction teems with exotic Australasian locales that often function as an end in themselves superfluous to plot requirements. The efficacy of this device is evident in copious reviews lauding his Australian savvy, and spectacular financial success. So meteoric was Boothby’s rise that a spoof article claiming he had recently purchased a solid-gold bath was reiterated as fact across numerous literary magazines. However, as well as a rich vein to be tapped for the metropolitan market, Boothby’s hyphenated identity was a source of conflict for him, producing a sense, expressed by many other contemporary colonial-migrant authors, of belonging fully neither to his home colony nor metropolitan Britain, a kind of ‘doubled hybridity’ as Robert Young puts it. This conflict is apparent in the public authorial persona Boothby adopted which alternatively valorises his outré colonial background and his new status of English country squire. Likewise it pervades his fiction manifesting itself in some idiosyncratic representations that ultimately seem to favour his Australian heritage.

This article presents from a historical point of view, starting from the 19th century to the present, the evolution of the main paraliterary genres in Romanian literature (science-fiction and fantasy literature, detective literature, thriller). The study is theoretically based on a double hypothesis. First, that the evolution of these genres follows the Fredric Jameson–Franco Moretti “law” according to which in peripheral cultures the novel is imported as a form of compromise between a Western form
and local materials. Secondly, that the communist period (1948–1989) is the reference period for the development of the popular fiction in Romania.

Keywords: popular fiction, Science Fiction, fantasy, detective novel, thriller.


(Rezumat)
Acest articol prezintă din punct de vedere istoric, din secolul al XIX-lea până în prezent, evoluția principalelor genuri paraliterare din România (literatura science-fiction și fantasy, literatura polițistă, literatura de tip thriller). Studiul se bazează din punct de vedere teoretic pe o dublă ipoteză. În primul rând, că evoluția acestor genuri urmează „legea” Fredric Jameson–Franco Moretti potrivit căreia în culturile periferice romanul este importat ca o formă de compromis între o formă occidentală și un fond local. În al doilea rând, că perioada de referință pentru dezvoltarea ficțiunii populare în România este perioada comunistă (1948–1989).

Deemed a great connoisseur of the human nature whose literary characters exhibit the deepest shadows of the human soul, Shakespeare has largely influenced modern views of certain historical personas. The most famous example is Richard III, perceived as the cruellest English ruler. Inspired by contradictory attitudes of popular fiction writers, Philippa Gregory and Anne O'Brien, toward Shakespeare's Richard, this paper argues that the Bard cemented the negative image of Richard III based on inconsistent historical sources. Likewise, by comparing Literature and popular fiction, the aim to show that Shakespeare's play presents a true popular work of fiction of its own time.

Contemporary popular culture’s misconstrued, romanticised views of Vikings seem almost to have become accepted as truth but, even if, at first glance, 'The Last Kingdom' seems only to mirror contemporary popular culture’s opinions of Viking culture, the methods Cornwell employs to reveal his true, underlying meaning overlap like a shield wall; his exciting, romanticised cover of Viking barbarism reflects contemporary popular culture opinions, but is merely a tool he employs to drive his commentary.

Clear cut distinctions between “popular fiction” / genre fiction / formula literature on the one hand and “High Literature” on the other hand have often been challenged during the past few decades as a result of, among other reasons, the growing rejection of the “humanist paradigm” since the 1960’s and the rapid expansion of the availability of popular entertainment through electronic media. This distinction between popular fiction and “Literature” is analysed from the point of readers’ expectations that vary, on a continuum between extreme escapism to the expectation to have one’s understanding of the world challenged. Various possibilities for the writer to address these expectations are proposed with reference to examples.

In the real world, Alice’s life only involved around being “punished” even though half the times she was only “anxious to be of use.” She is gleeful when realization dawns on her that in the Looking-Glass world that “there’ll be no one here to scold me away from the fire...what fun would it be, when they see me through the glass here, and can’t get at me.” Through this exclamation of Alice, it can be seen that she was trying to avoid confrontation with the adults of her family, and her childlike excitement comes forth in knowing they “can’t get at her.”

The present paper gives a cultural reading of the emergence of Himu, a fictional character created by Humayun Ahmed, as an iconic image in Bangladesh. It asserts Himu as a hyper-real iconic figure in the contemporary literary and cultural context of Bangladesh. This study also argues that Himu is a deliberate creation of the novelist to represent and popularize a certain philosophical notion of life. The paper reads Himu’s radical lifestyle or reckless attitude towards life as a reaction to the materialist philosophy of life. The ways through which he denies materialistic notions of life are read as technical rejection of capitalist ideologies.

Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' has always intrigued readers and critics equally. It is the iconic representation of the Jazz age and the writer's personal struggles. While there are many themes prominent in the novel.  This draft deals with the omniscience of 'American Dream' in the novel.