This chapter offers what Franco Moretti has called a “distant reading” of popular fictional narrative in the 1860s. That is, it concerns itself predominantly with charting changes in the larger units of generic form and publishing format, rather than attempting a close analysis of a limited set of canonical texts. The focus tends to fall on serial rather than volume publication, while the early career of Mary Elizabeth Braddon provides the subject of a specific case study. Such a procedure of course depends on the availability of comprehensive data sets, so that the chapter also touches on the recent growth in virtual archives and associated developments in the academic field of digital humanities, including the use of analytical methods owing more to book history than literary criticism.

The horror novel appears in the late twentieth century as a significant genre of popular fiction. Growing out of older traditions of the European Gothic and weird fiction, and their trajectory through American literature, the horror novel has produced some of the most famous names in writing, such as Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. Debates about the literary merits of horror have been frequent, but the genre undoubtedly holds an important place in fiction and in American culture more widely. The politics of the horror novel, then, are crucial. This chapter traces the history of critical commentary on the political position of horror, asking if it upholds or questions the status quo. It also moves beyond this model to examine modern transformations of the genre and self-conscious literary responses to the legacy of racism and misogyny that has been a subject of critique. Covering the horror novel’s response to varied social changes, including immigration, the sexual revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement, this chapter argues that it is capable of both reflecting on and exploiting social fears, and that its politics are as varied as its form, which has far more variety than narrow genre definitions might suggest.

This chapter focuses on the pairing of popular fiction and imperialism. It takes as a starting point the historical coincidence of the rise of new forms of popular fiction with the intensification of colonialism in Britain during the New Imperialism (roughly from the 1870s to 1914). Examining titles including H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and numerous others, the discussion treats Victorian popular fiction as both a site where colonialist ideology exerts its power and a site where ambivalences, vagaries and paradoxes speak of a struggle to make sense of imperial rationales. Examining how popular fiction represents history and the individual, landscape and temporality, threat and assimilation and the supposed adaptability of Englishness reveals some of the rhetorical and ideological contortions that rendered British imperialism thinkable to its own prosecutors.

From the 1920s through to the early 1960s, a popular genre of Australian commercial fiction focused on exploring or narrating stories about the outback and more exotic parts of Australian life and geography. Writers as diverse as Ion Idriess, F. J. Thwaites and E. V. Timms used their books to help other non-indigenous Australians engage with their ‘new’ nation. This chapter draws on a some of these novels and uses them to demonstrate how these stories brought to the fore issues of belonging, race, desire and anxiety. The analysis will focus on these texts’ descriptions of love and romance, including how and when intercultural desire was represented. The chapter explores how a settler-colonial logic based on dispossession, erasure and/or assimilation is deployed by the range of authors to mark out social as well as political boundaries of belonging. Overall, the chapter addresses two questions: first, how was Australia imagined and how were its citizens/subjects imagined as belonging to the nation in commercial fiction about race relations at this time; and second, how do stories of intimacy – mostly cis, heterosexual romance – shape these narratives of difference and national belonging? The chapter answers these questions using textual analysis and theories of difference.

This book shows how South African writing can help us to understand change after apartheid. It begins with the idea that imaginative writing offers productive, sometimes profound, insight into questions of major concern. It aims to shift the attention of literary criticism away from a narrow set of highbrow South African authors and towards the study of a wider range of texts, including popular fiction. And it exemplifies the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach by honing the focus of the study on specific concepts and topics. The object of analysis, at its largest level, is the South African polity as it veered between the hopeful optimism of the ‘Rainbow nation’ under Nelson Mandela, the murderous muddling of Thabo Mbeki and the ‘captured state’ under Jacob Zuma. Questions of a political, economic and sociological cast are central, with changes in the workplace, land reform, indigenous knowledge, corruption, crime and xenophobia providing specific points of focus. The creative literature of the post-apartheid period has a unique and powerful capacity to illuminate these issues and to intervene in our understanding of them.

This chapter provides a framework for the companion by defining world crime fiction and outlining the key theoretical issues involved in studying crime fiction as a global genre. The first section explores the global and transnational prehistories of crime fiction; it covers various forms of premodern crime writing and discusses the global dissemination of Western crime fiction from the late nineteenth century, highlighting the role of translation, pseudotranslation and adaptation in the emergence of local crime literatures. The second section focusses on the transnationalism of contemporary world crime fiction, arguing that the global adaptations of the genre are not just a matter of adding local colour, but involve formal hybridization that results in new, local versions of the genre. The final section discusses how crime fiction studies, as a field traditionally tied to Western crime writing, has recently moved towards a global and transnational conception of the genre. The overarching argument of the chapter is that founding world crime fiction as a research area requires a rethinking of the crime genre itself beyond the Anglocentrism of the scholarly tradition.

By 1920, according to the poet Bryher, ‘all literary London’ had ‘discovered Freud’ – but not all of those discoverers were fans. In a 1920 review of what she called ‘Freudian Fiction’, Virginia Woolf complained that ‘all the characters have become cases’. Writing in 1922, T. S. Eliot complained similarly of the reductive vision of a new ‘psychoanalytic type’ of novel that claimed to lay bare ‘the soul of man under psychoanalysis’. Tracking both the explicit interactions and the submerged engagements between British writers and psychoanalysis between 1900 and 1920, this chapter argues not only that writers and psychoanalysts in this period held a shared interest in representing what Woolf termed the ‘dark region’ of human psychology, but that psychoanalytic thinking about the unconscious is crucial for understanding the formal innovations of modernist writing in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century. Beginning with a sketch of the interactions between modernism and psychoanalysis in the early years of this period, it goes on to explore the strange affinities between Freud’s theory of the psyche and modernist formal innovations in both prose and poetry.

This chapter surveys Atwood’s three short fiction collections published since 2000 – The Tent, Moral Disorder, and Stone Mattress: Nine Tales – and is a sequel to the chapter “Margaret Atwood’s Short Stories and Shorter Fictions” presented in the original Companion. Arranged in three parts, one on each collection with detailed analyses of examples, the chapter explores generic questions raised in these highly varied collections of short fiction, together with Atwood’s thematic and stylistic range. The Tent features a dazzling mix of prose subgenres: fables, dialogues, essay-fictions, rewritings of myth, and prose poetry, which are analyzed in “No More Photos” and “Our Cat Enters Heaven,” while Moral Disorder, Atwood’s first short story cycle, shows how her storytelling comes closest to the short story proper. Stone Mattress introduces a new variant with its “tales,” moving beyond the boundaries of social realism into genre fiction as Atwood plays with those conventions, combining a strong interest in plot with social and ethical critique.

This introduction provides an overview and brief history of New Thought and Christian Science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly not only in America but also in Britain and Canada. The introduction also describes how popular literature written for and about children circa 1900 helped spread New Thought ideas while simultaneously critiquing them. As I explain, New Thought proved especially popular with female novelists and readers seeking escape from domestic duties and greater opportunities outside of the domestic sphere. Finally, the introduction includes a chapter breakdown outlining which works and concepts will be discussed later in the book.

This chapter explores a mise-en-scène familiar to us from postapocalyptic movies and video games: that of a future American city emptied of human life and activity. After tracing this chronotope back to early nineteenth-century European romantic fantasies of the “last man,” the essay considers how it came to be applied, with variations, to American cities between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth. Examples include works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois as well as those by largely forgotten authors, and encompass utopian and apocalyptic fiction as well as dystopian and postapocalyptic. Critics have largely characterized such visions of urban desolation as a negative, cathartic expression of some fear, whether of ethnic others, natural disaster, or nuclear warfare. This chapter, however, recovers the productive possibilities they offered. Vacated cityscapes empowered readers to reflect critically upon modern urban life, in particular new phenomena such as skyscraper architecture, technological infrastructure, the experience of surging crowds and webs of social interdependency, the suppression of nature, the impermanence of urban space, and racial segregation.

This chapter engages a range of texts that, for over thirty years, have shaped understandings of black and Asian British popular fictions through numerous forms and genres. In reading, among others, crime and detective fictions, female erotica, and The X-Press’s inner-city novels, and also music and popular film, the chapter suggests two theoretical trajectories: On the one hand, it explores the liminal space of the frontline as a framework for charting the politics of popular texts. On the other, it shows how these texts often negotiate their own positionalities through a self-reflexive ‘nobrow’ aesthetics. As it moves from the late 1980s to the 1990s, the first section revisits texts by, among others, Mike Phillips, Victor Headley, Sheri Campbell, Alex Wheatle, and Courttia Newland, whose work in part surfaced as a counter-movement to a highbrow literary aesthetics. Reaching into the twenty-first century, the second part addresses more recent popular textualities, like Wiley’s or Stormzy’s grime music, contemporary estate novels by Guy Gunaratne, Olumide Popoola, and Nikesh Shukla, as well as the films of Noel Clarke and Menhaj Huda.

The Gothic usually unfolds as an uncanny eruption of a past that refuses to stay buried and forgotten, and, as such, it is a primary way that New Orleans grapples publicly with the more disturbing aspects of its history. The Gothic is surely at the center of the city’s meaning for contemporary tourists, on one hand, and, on the other, much of its most cherished literature, from William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams to Lafcadio Hearn and George Washington Cable, is rooted in the Gothic. None of these figures, however, have reached audiences on the scale that Anne Rice’s New Orleans novels have, for these quintessentially Gothic tales have come, for many hundreds of thousands of readers, to equate the city with vampires, a figure that has an obvious symbolic resonance with the slave-owning class that controlled the city for generations, to say nothing of the city’s associations with non-heteronormative sexuality.