Pulp: Reading popular fiction

by Scott McCracken

Overview

Pulp brings together in one volume chapters on the best seller, detective fiction, popular romance, science fiction and horror. It combines a lucid and accessible account of the cultural theories that have informed the study of popular fiction with detailed readings of Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Colin Dexter, William Gibson, Stephen King, Iain Banks, Terry McMillan and Walter Mosley.

Scott Mc Cracken argues that popular fiction serves a vital function: it provides us with the means to construct a workable sense of self in the face of the disorientating pressures of modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780719047596
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	08/06/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.49(d)

About the Author

Scott McCracken is Lecturer in English at the University of Salford

Table of Contents

Introduction: World, Reader and Text
• Bestsellers
• Detective Fiction
• Popular Romance
• Science Fiction
• Gothic-horror
• Transgression and Utopianism in Popular Fiction

Editorial Reviews

Uses the critical approaches of modern social and cultural theory to understand the transaction between world, reader, and text in the realm of reading and understanding popular fiction. Analysis of texts of popular fiction also draws on literary theories to look at form. Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial criticism are used to analyze the modern self and the accounts of fragmentation that characterize modern and postmodern cultural forms. Paper edition (unseen), $22.95. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews