Popular fiction remains in some ways a rather nebulous category: at what point does a “literary” novel become an item of popular literature or a sexually explicit novel become pornographic rather than (or as well as) popular fiction? The chronology in this volume starts with Walter Scott's Waverley of 1814 and continues to Belle de Jour's The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl of 2005 (Fifty Shades of Grey appeared too late for inclusion). The contemporary popularity of Scott and later of Dickens equalled and often outshone any of the hysteria we observe today around televised soap operas; today, Scott is rarely read while Dickens seems to achieve more fame through televised adaptations, although there is evidence that the popularity of these leads some (or many?) viewers back into reading the originals. At which point we seem to come full circle since Dickens originally wrote as part of a widely popular printed serialisation culture in fiction from penny dreadfuls to his own novels.
These have always been matters of vital commercial concern to the book trade, while over the last 40 years (and at increasing pace over the last 20 or so) academic interest too has focussed more closely on many aspects of popular fiction. Dickens, Scott and other “classic” novelists had long been the subject of traditional literary examination, but now their impact on a wide readership has also been the subject of academic study. I recall reading the pioneer works on popular literature by Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in the late 1950s and am pleased to note the inclusion in the bibliography to this volume of still one of my favourites on this topic, Richard Altick's The English Common Reader of 1957.
Overall the 11 chapters (and an introduction) of this book give a comprehensive assessment of the current state of academic study of popular fiction in various forms. A useful overview is given in the introduction and chapter 1 (Publishing, History, Genre) before chapter 2 (Fiction, Theatre and Early Cinema) takes us into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' aspects of fiction and different media. Television and Serial Fictions then comprises chapter 3 before the first of the specialist studies reviews “[…] the true meaning of the zombie apocalypse”. The popularity of zombie films and stories is an area I fail to connect with, despite the attempts of my grandchildren to enlighten me.
Creation and publishing of popular fiction, in whatever forms, is one side of the coin: consumption is the other. Chapter 5 therefore covers “The Reader of Popular Fiction” and chapter 6 “Reading Time: Popular Fiction and the Everyday.” Gender and sexuality are the subject of chapter 7.
The remainder of the book looks at mass selling and then contemporary multi‐media. Pulp Sensations (chapter 8) is followed by an overview survey of studies of Bestselling Fiction: Machinery, Economy, Excess. Comic books and graphic novels are the subject of chapter 10. This I found particularly interesting since I grew up in the heyday (perhaps) certainly of comics, but with some graphic novels too: I cannot recall all the details so long afterwards but certainly my first reading of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (and of one or two more books as well) was in the form of a comic‐strip book during a seaside holiday in the mid‐1950s. And finally to my grandchildren's contemporary world with Popular Fiction in the Digital Age.
The chronology at the start of the volume is useful if very selective; the bibliography is wide ranging and source notes to each chapter give further more detailed sources. The index is adequate. Despite the rise of media studies and the like, the academic authors almost all have the word “literature” in their job titles. They seem pretty well evenly divided between the US and the UK, although interestingly (perhaps tellingly) for the UK none are listed as teaching at Oxford or Cambridge. The two editors are from Southampton and Keele universities respectively.
“This complex and vibrant cultural field” is certainly both of those qualities. It is a subject which stretches back (and forward) in time, across cultures, media, readers or consumers and is constantly shifting, especially now in the light of rapidly developing technology. This is a thorough survey of the current state of academic study of this area, sadly written throughout in academic language which precludes it being read by consumers themselves except where they are also students of the subject. But for academics and students it is an invaluable source and guide to a subject, or subjects, of wide social, cultural and academic application.
