The Cambridge Companion To Popular Fiction

D AV I D G L O V E R A N D S C O T T M C C R A C K E N
Introduction
What is popular fiction?

‘Popular fiction’ is a deceptively simple phrase, at once indispensable and
commonplace, yet often left unsettlingly vague. One of the problems with
finding a clear definition of popular fiction is that the object of study is not
always clear. The cultural formation designated by ‘popular fiction’ has
changed over time and varies according to its cultural and geographical
situation. In this volume, we identify the late nineteenth century as the
period when the genres that constitute so much of popular fiction emerge;
but we recognise that the reception of these genres is in a state of continuous
evolution. A key factor in this evolution has been the productive relation-
ship between popular fiction and new media technologies from radio, to
cinema, to the internet. This amounts to a wide view of culture and this
means that when we study popular fiction we are studying just such a broad
cultural field rather than a single object or objects.
But let us start with the simplest definition: popular fiction is frequently
thought of as those books that everyone reads, usually imagined as a
league table of bestsellers whose aggregate figures dramatically illustrate
an impressive ability to reach across wide social and cultural divisions with
remarkable commercial success. In itself, this open-ended definition tells us
very little, since it suggests that popular fiction is merely an empty box
within which almost any novel might find a highly lucrative place. But a
quick glance at the weekly charts shows that this is not so: certain popular
genres predominate. In the first week of July 2010, for example, seven of
the top ten paperback fiction titles in Britain were crime narratives by
such writers as Stieg Larsson, Harlan Coben, James Patterson, Lynda La
Plante and Patricia Cornwell, books that could variously be classed as
‘murder mysteries’, ‘crime thrillers’, ‘police procedurals’ or ‘detective
fiction’.1 Indeed, if one adds another title from the list, Picture Perfect by
the American author Jodi Picoult, arguably this tally would be even higher,
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david glover and scott mccracken
for Picoult’s story of a woman’s painful escape from violent domestic

abuse begins with the heroine awakening bruised and bloody in a grave-
yard and struggling to recover the memory of who she is and what has
happened to her.
The fact that it is possible to pick out recurrent topics and formulae in
these weekly compilations suggests another way of understanding popular
fiction. According to this approach, popular fiction is primarily based upon
a limited number of forms or genres of narrative pleasure, such as suspense,
romantic complications, bodily horror or futuristic speculation. These rep-
ertoires of devices effectively bring their audiences into existence using
fictional lures that hook readers into the text, so that they are driven to
repeat the experience at regular intervals. In one of the earliest analytic
surveys of science fiction, New Maps of Hell (1960), the novelist Kingsley
Amis identified this type of pleasure-seeking as a type of addiction that
characteristically begins in adolescence. To get to the heart of any given
genre, so the argument goes, it is necessary to probe the nature of this
intense fixation. Despite Amis’s somewhat dated insistence on the inher-
ently addictive properties of genre reading – today we would speak of ‘fans’
or ‘fandom’ – readers who are strongly committed to particular kinds of
writing can certainly be identified.
But two important qualifications need to be made here. First, while it is
undoubtedly true that much contemporary reading is organised in this way,
typical instances of popular genre, such as those narratives shelved under
‘crime fiction’ or ‘romance’, are more loosely structured than the metaphor
of addiction suggests. As the variety of possible labels for several of the July
2010 bestsellers indicates, narratives that are built around crime scarcely
comprise a homogeneous category. Picture Perfect involves a mystery and
an investigation, but it is also about making sense of emotional entrapment
and dealing with difficult personal relationships. A book by Lynda La Plante
which sold roughly the same number of copies as Picture Perfect in the same
week provides an instructive comparison. Set within a team of police
detectives, La Plante’s Silent Scream clearly belongs among the more ortho-
dox traditions of crime writing than does Picoult’s novel, yet its central
concern is with the professional tensions experienced by its heroine DI Anna
Travis, as she attempts to do her job successfully in a predominantly male
working environment.
Questions of gender are never far away in the work of both these other-
wise rather different writers. And this is true of the weekly charts as a
whole, suggesting that the links between generic elements and sexual differ-
ence are a major factor in the success of a bestselling text. Each week, the
thematic mix displayed among the ten bestselling paperbacks undergoes a
2
Introduction
subtle shift. In the week following the first list of bestselling paperbacks in
July, two of the crime narratives had disappeared, pushed out by Take a
Chance on Me from ‘chick lit’ writer Jill Mansell, and David Balducci’s True
Blue, a thriller about a former woman police officer trying to get back her
old job on the force. Picture Perfect had moved into the number one spot,
selling over 14,000 more copies in a week than the previous occupant, a
book of short stories by the Irish novelist Maeve Binchy. So the second
important point to make about popular fiction is the fluid and heteroge-
neous nature of much of its audience. Indeed, what this brief survey indi-
cates is that it is possible to think in terms of two distinct but overlapping
popular readerships: those who come closest to resembling Amis’s ‘addicts’,
locked into a given genre or subgenre, though often reading books that do
not command massive sales; and a wider, more diverse audience that moves
in and out of the various divisions of the popular fiction market. Such
readers might pick up Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but
would not necessarily turn to crime fiction for their next read.
Thus, it would be misleading to imply that the ‘popular’ in popular fiction
is purely a matter of sales. In fact, the concept of the ‘popular’ has a longer
and more complex political and cultural history that also impacts upon the
ways in which popular fiction has been understood. In her invaluable
history of the word, Morag Shiach (1989) points out that ‘popular’ first
began to appear in sixteenth-century legal contexts, referring to rights or
prerogatives that were available to everyone, as in the concept of ‘popular
government’ or government by all the people and not just some. This usage
soon came to be regarded with suspicion by members of the political class
and, by the early seventeenth century, to be described as ‘popular and
ambitious’ meant that you were someone who sought to trick or deceive
people; and ‘popularity’ became a pejorative term for gaining influence over
people in order to serve one’s own nefarious political ends.2 At the same
time, the notion of the popular was inverted and disvalued, as when the
writer Jonathan Swift described riots and protests as ‘popular commotions’,
so that the ‘popular’ signified what is ‘low’ or ‘base’, in the sense of vulgar,
degraded or open to manipulation.
Each of these shades of meaning captures part of the truth about the
concept of the popular, but they pull in different directions, posing some-
thing of a dilemma. For anyone trying to make sense of the ‘popular’, this
tension between what is genuinely a manifestation of popular taste or will
and what is imposed upon people by those for whom culture is a business
constitutes the central historical dynamic of modern popular culture, ‘the
double movement of containment and resistance’, as the cultural critic
Stuart Hall once characterised it.3 In an acute overview of the debates
3
around popular culture, Hall argued against emphasising one pole of this
dynamic at the expense of the other. For it is crucial to see that the entire
cultural field is constantly in flux, torn between competing interests and
attachments:
If the forms of provided popular culture are not purely manipulative, then it
is because, alongside the false appeals, the foreshortenings, the trivialization
and shortcircuits, there are also elements of recognition and identification,
something approaching a recreation of recognisable experiences and attitudes,
to which people are responding (p. 233).
What happens in the home or in the workplace, the relationships among

men and women or between ethnic groups and social classes, furnishes the
raw material out of which the characters and situations that populate the
pages of popular fiction are constructed, not as an unproblematic approxi-
mation to the real, but as a stylised and highly mediated set of narrative
modes. Yet while ‘the cultural industries do have the power constantly
to rework and reshape what they represent’, their activities are always
the site of an ongoing struggle around what is acceptable, what rings true,
and what can be enjoyed uncritically (p. 233). In Hall’s view, it is these
social, political and economic conflicts that make popular culture into a
kind of battleground. And although the examples he cites go as far back
as the seventeenth century, it is the decades between the 1880s and the
1920s that he identifies as a watershed in ‘the changed relationship
between the people and the concentration and expansion of the new
cultural apparatuses’ (p. 231).
Defining the field

Like Stuart Hall, we, too, see the end of the nineteenth century as the
period when the distinctive genres of twentieth-century popular fiction –
detective stories, science fiction, romance and Gothic horror – emerge in
their modern forms. This is not to deny their much older precursors.
As Roger Luckhurst notes in Chapter 4, the roots of the Gothic are usually
located in the eighteenth century and some critics date elements of detective
stories, romance and science fiction as far back as the myths of antiquity.
Nevertheless, it is the application of the new technologies of industrial
production to publishing, an expanding market driven by increased lite-
racy and urbanisation, and the emergence of new commercial media that
together decisively change the conditions in which popular fiction is
created. In editing this Companion, one of our main aims has been to place
the growth and development of contemporary popular fiction in historical
4
Introduction
perspective. This is a complex task because the different strands that com-
prise popular fiction as we know it today do not inhabit a single uniform
time-frame, but are often the product of diverse kinds of histories. Genres
and cultural forms have their own particular genealogies and the labels by
which they are known can be highly controversial, with sharp disagree-
ments about how, and even whether, terms like ‘detective fiction’ or ‘graphic
novel’ ought to be used. Concepts such as ‘pulp fiction’ or the ‘bestseller’ do
not have clear critical histories or rather their critical histories are still in the
process of being made.
For this reason, the focus of the first four chapters is upon the ways in
which the broad field of popular fiction came to be established, not only
through changes in the publishing industry, but also through the creation of
a reading public. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the book trade
was dominated by sales to private subscription libraries patronised by
middle-class readers, while artisans and unskilled workers tended to rely
on cheap fiction published in weekly or monthly parts. In Chapter 1, David
Glover traces the rise and fall of this dual economy as inexpensive reprints
created a growing market for single-volume novels and writers found new
outlets in the rapidly expanding network of popular fiction magazines. It
was within this new force-field that the core genres took hold – although
why a relatively small sub-set of popular genres rather than others were so
massively successful remains hotly contested.4
There are at least two factors that complicate the search for a satisfactory
explanation of how specific kinds of writing, certain texts and certain
authors come to dominate. In the first place, as some of the most challen-
ging recent historical studies have emphasised, the changing spatial patterns
of book circulation over time have long had a significant international
dimension. In his Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (1998), for
example, Franco Moretti has argued that France differed markedly from
the rest of Europe because the high esteem enjoyed by the French language
in this period allowed it to create a flourishing export trade in fiction, while
importing very little. French novels could therefore ‘travel faster and farther,
occupying cultural niches before their rivals’ – hence the pan-European
success of a hugely popular writer like Alexandre Dumas.5 But it was not
just individual works of fiction that moved from country to country: some
types of popular narrative, like the ‘mysteries of the city’ genre associated
with Sue and Reynolds in the mid-nineteenth century, were picked up
and rewritten for a variety of national cultures, exchanging Berlin or
San Francisco for Paris and London as their familiar settings. To chart
these movements and transformations we perhaps need to supplement the
methods of close reading used by most literary critics and historians with
5
what Moretti terms ‘distant reading’. For Moretti, reading at a distance sets
aside the personal encounter with a particular text in order ‘to focus on
units that are much smaller or larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes –
or genres and systems’ and to see the literary field as a whole in action.6
Second, when explaining the successes achieved by popular fiction, it is
vital that we place them within the broader field of popular culture. The
history of popular fiction leads into another history, that of the busy traffic
between narrative fiction and those extra-literary modes of popular culture,
including stage and screen, without which popular fiction is now incon-
ceivable, either as an economic system or as a system of images and
representations. As Nicholas Daly notes in his essay on ‘Fiction, theatre,
and early cinema’ (Chapter 2), popular fiction was not only part of a two-
way transatlantic commercial flow during the second half of the nineteenth
century, but there was also a close and symbiotic relationship between
popular literary texts and visual narrative, initially through the theatre and
then via film with the entry of this new medium into the already existing
spaces and practices of spectacle and performance. Silent cinema was, of
course, overtaken by the so-called ‘talkies’ in the early 1930s, while film in
turn faced competition from radio and then, from the 1950s, television, both
of which offered new types of home-centred entertainment. The interrelation-
ships identified by Daly in the late 1800s have a rather longer history than we
usually assume, and in Chapter 3 John Caughie extends this link by showing
the sustained historical connection between nineteenth-century serials and
their varied incarnations in present-day television.
In the mass politics of the twentieth century, the vast audiences that
these cultural forms could attract meant that they inevitably belonged to a
turbulent yet increasingly profitable cultural field in which popular narra-
tives circulated from one medium to another. Many of the chapters in this
Companion seek to gain purchase on this turbulence by describing vari-
ations of that recurrent moment when the popular is identified as a
problem and brought into peculiarly sharp relief. Predictably, negative
definitions are the order of the day: a particular type of popular reading
matter is branded as monstrous; as dangerously feminine; as sexually
transgressive; or as corrupting and degenerate. Such moments are best
understood as (self-)interested attempts to police and tame what are per-
ceived to be the most unruly and recalcitrant elements within popular
culture – one thinks, for example, of the moral panics around horror
comics in the 1950s or the continuing concern about violent or porno-
graphic writing in the present. While cultural critics have their work cut
out in trying to unearth the underlying stakes and investments that animate
such controversies, the difficulties that they face are very much a product
6
Introduction
of the complex interrelationships between readers, genres, media and the

culture industries in which they are embedded.
But, as Roger Luckhurst points out in Chapter 4, popular fiction did not
merely depend upon the rise of large-scale audiences or readerships, it was
also part of a new and dynamic public sphere, in which discussion and
debate became possible, and through which a new public openness could be
relayed. Sometimes views could be exchanged in response to newspaper or
magazine reviews, but public opinion could also be directly mobilised while
attending drama and other entertainments in theatres and the early picture
palaces. The anxieties provoked by these forms of mass participation were
integral to discussions of popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries and worries about the volatility of popular taste have frequently
underpinned both theory and research. As we will see in a moment, the
investigation of audiences, their formation and reading habits has been a
central area of interest for scholars concerned with popular fiction, not least
because reading publics are continually being remade, not only in relation
to new writers and new texts, but also when the constituents of well-
established genres start to change their meaning. In the 1950s, for instance,
no one would have predicted that Jim Thompson’s lurid American ‘paper-
back originals’ like After Dark, My Sweet (1955) or The Killer Inside Me
(1952) would have acquired a cult following among youthful male readers
some forty years later in the aftermath of second-wave feminism, nor that
these former drugstore paperbacks would be marketed under a ‘classic
crime’ trade imprint. This example again underscores the fluidity and
heterogeneity of popular fiction and also reflects the ongoing two-way
influence of film and print. In this kind of volatile environment, the recyc-
ling of popular texts is often perceived as a challenge to standards of public
taste, as indicated by the recent controversy surrounding the portrayal of
violence in British director Michael Winterbottom’s film adaptation of The
Killer Inside Me (2010). Understandings of the readership of popular fiction
are central to such controversies and Chapters 5–7 focus on these issues, but
the question of the audience features in almost every chapter of this volume.
Readers and audiences

Interest in the audience of popular fiction has been part of a critical shift in
the last half century that has sought to take ordinary readers seriously rather
than condemning their bad taste. But the reader is as much a sociological
and a historical problem as a literary one and studies of readers have often
emerged from outside literary studies. Mike Denning’s influential Mechanic
Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture (1985) is, as its name
7
suggests, as much a study of working-class culture as pulp fiction. Such

work continues to probe hitherto neglected historical records in order – in
the words of Jonathan Rose – ‘to enter the minds of ordinary readers in
history, to discover what they read and how they read it’.7 In his book The
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), Rose argues that we
need to ‘break the habit of treating high culture and popular culture as two
distinct categories with mutually exclusive audiences’. The recollections of
the self-educated nineteenth- and twentieth-century men and women in his
study indicate that they immersed themselves in ‘a promiscuous mix of high
and low’, irrespective of geographical location, generation or economic
status and, although they often discriminated between different types of
reading matter, some were keenly aware that ‘even classics could appropri-
ate themes and devices from trash literature’ (pp. 369, 371).
The experience of women readers has been subject to a comparable
reassessment. Women have always, from the eighteenth century onwards,
been the majority of readers of fiction and, as Nicola Humble and Kaye
Mitchell describe (Chapters 5 and 7) their association with the popular novel
has often been used as a pretext for its dismissal. The growth of critical
interest in popular fiction aimed at women was part of the wider impact of
second-wave feminism on literary studies through which neglected female
writers and readers have been reassessed and women’s contribution to all
forms of literature has been scrupulously re-examined. A feminist-inspired
concern with women’s experience has led to research into those forms of
popular fiction where that experience is represented and contested, inclu-
ding those texts which command the largest audiences. In the cases of both
class and gender formations, popular fiction offers not so much an authen-
tic account of people’s everyday lives, but an example of the interaction
between that experience and the dominant (or hegemonic) social and
cultural structures and ideologies. Thus, interpretations of popular romance
are themselves the site of considerable disagreement. Mills and Boon
romances (or Harlequin in North America) have been interpreted both as
instances of women’s oppression and subordination, and alternatively as
containing repressed elements of resistance and even revenge.8
The representation of sexuality has long been a particularly fraught area,
the subject of moralism and taboo for much of the previous century and
beyond, not least where depictions of lesbianism or homosexuality have
been at issue. As Mitchell and Erin Smith (Chapter 8) make clear, it was the
most despised reaches of the mass paperback market that provided a space
within which such queer sexualities could be explored, their illicit appeal
struggling against (and perhaps incited by) the orthodox medical and reli-
gious discourses that sought to pathologise them. The fear and fascination
8
Introduction
aroused by this kind of fantasmatic reading at the limit is a sign of the

intensity with which such ‘trashy’ texts are consumed by readers who only
meet in their imaginations.
This example is a reminder that, despite the upsurge of interest, as
Humble and Scott McCracken (Chapter 6) remind us, the reader’s experi-
ence probably remains the least understood dimension of popular fiction.
Just as lesbian romance can attract a sexually diverse audience, so, in the
increasingly globalised field that popular fiction has now become, cross-
gendered, cross-racial and cross-cultural readerships are more often the
norm than the exception. While the success of African-American writers
such as Terry McMillan has benefited directly from the large market for
fiction amongst African-American women in the United States, her audience
extends well beyond that community. Popular forms such as romance have
been remarkably adaptable across cultures and across media. For example,
Latin American telenovelas are melodramatic, serialised television dramas
with romantic themes that relate to novelas rosas, the Spanish equivalent of
anglophone formula romance. While telenovelas have a clear origin and
cultural base, starting in Mexico in the 1950s, with Brazil now the biggest
producer, their audience now extends beyond the Hispanic population of
the Americas to Eastern Europe, Asia and parts of the Middle East and
Africa. Some have even been remade for different national audiences. The
Colombian, Yo soy Betty la fea, became Ugly Betty in the United States, but
there are also versions in at least fifteen other languages. As McCracken
shows with the example of crime writer Walter Mosley, popular fiction
circulates between local and global markets, taking on different meanings
in different places. Yet there is relatively little known about the nuances of
the different receptions of popular fictions in different places and contexts.9
If, as Humble makes clear, research into audiences and reading communities
has become an indispensable element in the study of popular fiction, there is
no shortage of questions in search of answers.
One area identified by Humble and Brenda Silver (Chapter 11) as a
rich source for understanding reader response is the vast quantity of fan
fictions found on the internet. These usually bear a direct relationship to
existing popular texts in a number of media ‘canons’, but create their own
‘fan-on’, which interprets and manipulates the original generic forms in new
ways. Narrative forms such as blogs have also crossed back into paperback
form, as with the sex-blogs discussed by Mitchell. Such examples give
some indication of the relationship between the private (or, more accurately,
‘privatised’) consciousness of the individual reader and the public media, of
which the internet is only the latest, if the most far-reaching apparatus. This
suggests that the boundary between private and public consciousness is
9
permeable, that readers are actively engaged in the making and remaking of
popular fiction and, as Scott McCracken in Chapter 6 suggests, popular
fiction’s success depends on the degree to which it can bring together and
represent the diffuse temporalities of modernity in forms which the reader
can relate to.
New media environments

The field of popular fiction has become more complicated in the last fifty
years as new media have emerged using the internet as their platform, while
older forms of fiction have gained a new prominence. We have already
alluded to blogs and fan fictions as examples of the former, but these are
only part – although a rapidly proliferating part – of a much bigger picture
that also takes in computer gaming and interactive narratives. By contrast,
pulp fiction is an area of popular writing that has changed out of all
recognition since the dime novels started to appear in the United States in
the middle years of the nineteenth century, the days of Buffalo Bill and
Deadwood Dick. In fact, the very term ‘pulp fiction’, immortalised in the
title of Quentin Tarantino’s intensely style-conscious film (1994), evokes an
aura of nostalgia that owes much to a combination of committed historical
research and the collector’s passion for discarded exotica. Once a byword in
subliterary sensationalism, ‘pulp fiction’ reveals how the most universally
derided of popular forms can undergo comprehensive re-evaluation,
upgraded from a suspect set of narrative formulae to what could best be
described as an edgy contemporary sensibility – as discussed in Chapter 8
by Erin Smith.
The pulps show the fluidity of popular genres and how idiosyncratic their
histories can be, a point which is reinforced by Hillary Chute and Marianne
DeKoven’s chapter on comics and graphic novels. Although they trace the
pre-history of comics back to eighteenth-century engravings, the evolution
of this medium contains ruptures as well as continuities and the movement
from the comic book to the graphic novel can hardly be judged a smooth
transition. Authors like Alan Moore actively dislike the term ‘graphic
novel’, dismissing it as a mere marketing tool and preferring instead the
unpretentious ‘comic book’, a tradition which continues to flourish, not
least in the thousands of webcomics and online comics available through the
internet. From an international perspective, the growth of comics has been
uneven, with sudden and hugely successful bursts of activity that have seen
some late developers like post-1945 manga in Japan blossoming remarkably
quickly, shaped by centuries-old indigenous techniques in printing and
painting and by the massive importation of Western comics after the Second
10
Introduction
World War. These kinds of cultural crossings are becoming increasingly

common as publishers seek to find ways to transcend the limits of national
markets. As Chute and DeKoven show in some detail, the publishing history
of a text like the Iranian author Marjane Satrapi’s story of her Tehran and
Vienna childhood Persepolis (2003) achieving a mass-market first in France
and subsequently in the United States in English translation and again as an
animated film, is a fascinating example of what Jay David Bolter and
Richard Grusin have dubbed ‘remediation’, the transfer of narrative possi-
bilities from one medium to another.10
Bolter and Grusin’s argument suggests that the encounter of new media
technologies with old leads to a complex process of redefinition affecting
both form and content, which would now include adaptations for theatre,
film, television, comic books and video games. But we would also want to
include here official and unlicensed sequels to already well-worn texts, such
as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, where the
aim is to provide a supplement that invokes and recapitulates the original
while moving the storyline forward for readers in new times. ‘Late’
remediation can be said to differ substantially from the ‘early’ remediation
of the 1900s in the sheer range of possibilities for recycling narratives that
twenty-first-century digital technologies have placed at our disposal. There
are no better examples of this process than the adventure games and
interactive fiction discussed by Brenda Silver in Chapter 11, narrative struc-
tures that can be accessed via one’s home computer, in which texts that owe
their inspiration to bestselling authors like J. R. R. Tolkien and Douglas
Adams, or to new film series like Toy Story (1995–2010), acquire a radically
new format.
It is not that bestsellers and blockbusters no longer matter. A glance at a
trade publication like The Bookseller reveals that publishers and book-
shops continue to be obsessed with sales figures of individual titles and
the fact that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has been the UK’s biggest-
selling paperback of all time carries enormous weight. There is as yet not
enough work that attempts to examine the social lives of popular texts as
they move across continents, their sales figures carefully tracked by the
marketing departments of publishing conglomerates.11 This lack of know-
ledge contributes to the sense of mystery that haunts the bestseller: its
elusiveness, its unpredictability, its incalculable impact. For while genres
like science fiction stubbornly persist, the bestseller is characterised by
ephemerality and inconstancy. As Fred Botting observes in Chapter 9, the
phenomenon of the bestseller, borrowing from each and every genre and
medium, sticking to the well-worn groove of success, yet requiring some-
thing new to whet the jaded palate, capitalising on the signifiers of a
11
success that may not yet even have occurred – ‘an international bestseller’
(or so the publisher hopes) – finally defies any single explanation.
But some commentators see even the bestseller as having passed its peak.
According to this view, the opportunities afforded by electronic inventories
to monitor and track transactions has accentuated the differences between
the two tendencies within popular fiction that we noted earlier in this
introduction: on the one hand the definition of the popular by a mass
audience; on the other, the subdivision of that audience into distinct groups,
which follow particular forms or genres. This produces a split between
those books that appear in the weekly charts and those bought by the large
but fragmented readership that, taken to its extreme, dissolves into a
multiplicity of specialised niche markets, or what business analyst Chris
Anderson has called ‘the long tail’ of the distribution of cultural goods.12
Anderson’s point is that internet-based sales can be based upon electronic-
ally tagged back catalogues of items (books, music downloads, DVDs, etc.)
that are cheap to stock and make it possible to make an acceptable profit on
transactions with a very small number of buyers. Indeed, for some critics it
is the latter trend that now defines the emergent reality of the economics of
contemporary popular culture. So, according to Michael Denning, while
‘the capital invested in culture is more concentrated than ever, cultural
commodities appear less centralized, less concentrated’ and their audiences
increasingly resemble ‘a series of elaborate, interlocking subcultures, each
with their own market share’.13 If Denning’s remarks represent at best only
a partial truth, the implications of the digital inventory upon the study of
popular fiction are nevertheless profound; and, not surprisingly, one can
certainly discern a renewed interest in questions of consumption and circu-
lation in recent years. It also offers a valuable corrective to overconfident
talk of a global culture – that imaginary home to the international bestseller.
For not only do the weekly charts vary from country to country, but the
bestselling ‘fiction’ lists are compiled along quite different lines. India, like
Japan, includes memoirs, essays and historical biography in its fiction
charts, for example, with books on child-rearing alongside Bridget Jones
and Dennis Lehane, as well as ‘local’ authors like Rohinton Mistry and
Shashi Tharoor.14
This blurring of the distinction between matters of fact, public opinion
and fiction leads us to ask: what capacity for transformation do popular
narratives possess? At what point might the dialectic between the comforts
of familiarity and the possibilities of the new create the conditions for
cultural change? And can the audience for popular narratives ever become
the locus of a desire for a better world? One answer must be that if it did not
at least imply the possibility that readers might become the authors of their
12
Introduction
own future, fiction would have no appeal at all, let alone be popular.
However, it should be pointed out that this view, often counterposed to
versions of the popular consumer as dupe, depends on a democratic and
transformative view of society. A more conservative account might well
choose to emphasise the normative structures of popular narratives and play
down the principle of hope as an entertaining form of escapism. However,
to think in terms of ‘subcultures’, the category that best describes the terrain
occupied by the pulps, graphic novels, computer gaming and fan fictions, is
to begin to see how readerships come to shift towards a new collective sense
of who they are. While the lesbian pulps of the 1950s and 1960s, for
example, were originally published with the ostensible aim of titillating
straight men, their availability also created a space for an emergent, public
lesbian identity. Similarly, graphic novels emerged out of the confluence of
comic strips in the commercial press and the counter-culture of cartoons and
pop art, demonstrating what Chute and DeKoven call ‘the power of visua-
lizing the suppressed and unspoken’, with results that have been both
subversive and popular. It is within these highly charged contexts that
questions of cultural transformation begin to become inseparable from a
language of cultural and aesthetic value, a point that moves to the forefront
of analysis in the last two chapters of this Companion. For if comics
and interactive games begin life as commodities that can be bought and
sold across a range of cultural markets, they simultaneously create a
community of enthusiasts – practitioners, readers, fans and critics – organised
around a belief in the artistry and the political urgency of these texts and
practices. As in the past, the remaking of popular fiction not only brings into
being new sorts of stories, but also sets in play new modes of public discourse
and debate.
NOTES
1 See ‘The Weekly Charts’ in The Guardian Saturday Review, 3 July 2010, p. 17,
based upon data supplied by Nielsen BookScan.
2 Morag Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender and History in
Cultural Analysis, 1730 to the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 22–3.
3 Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular”’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.),
People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981),
pp. 227–40, 228. Subsequent references will appear in parentheses in the text.
4 See Franco Moretti, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, Modern Language Quarterly
61:1 (March 2000): 207–27.
5 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998),
p. 185.
6 Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ (2000), reprinted in Christopher
Prendergast (ed.), Debating World Literature (London: Verso, 2004), p. 151.
13
7 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2001), p. 1. Subsequent references will appear in parentheses
in the text.
8 See Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for
Women (London: Methuen, 1982); Jean Radford (ed.), The Progress of Romance:
The Politics of Popular Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
9 See, however, Ien Ang, Watching ‘Dallas’: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic
Imagination (London: Routledge, 1985).
10 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
11 For a useful recent account of sales and marketing, see Claire Squires, Marketing
Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
12 Chris Anderson, The Longer Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating
Unlimited Demand (updated and expanded edn. London: Random House
Business Books, 2009).
13 Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004),
p. 102.
14 ‘What the World is Reading: Love and Accountants and Growing Old’, The
Economist, 1 August 2002.
14
1
D AV I D G L O V E R
Publishing, history, genre
In one of its earliest (but still recognisably modern) incarnations, the

trade of writing was linked to a specific locale: from the beginning of the
seventeenth century, the name of Grub Street developed a very mixed
reputation as the place in London where authors, and the booksellers and
publishers who paid them, lived cheek by jowl, working together to turn a
profit. But by the end of the eighteenth century, the street name had
acquired an imaginative life of its own. No longer simply a commercial
address, ‘Grub-Street’ became a dismissive term for any published work that
had been hastily written for money and was thought to be of poor quality, the
product of literary hacks, no matter where it had originated. This distinctly
downmarket meaning endured. When George Gissing (1857–1903) began
writing the novel he eventually called New Grub Street (1891), no street had
borne that name for over fifty years; yet he could still credibly use the phrase
to mark a point in the growth of the late Victorian publishing industry when
the everyday reality of those who sought to make a living from writing, and
particularly from writing fiction, seemed to be more debased and discour-
aging than ever before – or so Gissing would have his readers believe.
In the novel, Gissing’s characters struggle to survive in what is described
as an increasingly competitive transnational market where ‘telegraphic
communication’ supplies ‘men of business, however seedy’ with up-to-the-
minute knowledge of exactly ‘what literary fare is in demand in every part
of the world’.1 In their desperate attempts to satisfy this demand, aspiring
authors are driven into a frenetic, but ultimately empty, labour of writing,
whether they prosper or fail. Marian Yule, who clings to the idea that what
she calls ‘really good work’ will eventually be appreciated (p. 29), neverthe-
less feels as though she were turning into the equivalent of a factory worker,
losing her identity as a woman and functioning as ‘a mere machine for
reading and writing’ (p. 106). Worse still, she fantasises about the invention
of a real ‘literary machine’ that will soon displace her, an ‘automaton to
supply the place of such poor creatures as herself, to turn out books and
15
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david glover
articles’ (p. 107). By contrast, her hard-headed suitor Jasper Milvain glories
in his skill as ‘an extempore writer’, knowing full well that the price of
success is that he will ‘never . . . do anything of solid literary value’ (p. 74).
Motivated solely by the lure of financial gain and contemptuous of his
readers, Milvain chooses to churn out reviews and essays for those news-
papers and journals that pay the most, rather than waste his time as a
novelist. It is a further sign of his cynicism that he quickly abandons Marian
for a rich widow as soon as one becomes available, despite having already
proposed marriage to her.
Although New Grub Street was never intended as a popular novel, the
controversy aroused by his bleak portrayal of the literary marketplace
significantly raised Gissing’s profile as a writer and, rather ironically,
brought him into contact with celebrities like Grant Allen and H. G. Wells
who were able to make serious money from their books. From their per-
spective, New Grub Street showed precisely how and why the world of
fiction was changing. The crux of the problem lay in the dominant role
played by the private subscription libraries like Mudie’s or W. H. Smith’s in
supplying what would otherwise be relatively high-priced new novels to the
largest pool of regular readers of fiction, the growing middle-class reading
public. By setting themselves up as the biggest single purchasers of novels,
and carrying a stock of well over a hundred thousand books in some of their
larger metropolitan branches, these so-called ‘circulating’ libraries were
able to capitalise on and perpetuate the ‘triple-decker’ or three-volume
format that had become the norm among publishers at the beginning of
the nineteenth century. In essence, the graded structure of borrowing rights
and subscription rates that lay at the heart of the libraries’ profitability was
built upon the division of the novel into three individually bound parts. At
Mudie’s, initially the most influential of the library chains, an ordinary
member’s annual subscription rate of a guinea (or twenty-one shillings) only
allowed each borrower to take out one volume of any particular novel at a
time, while those wishing to borrow additional volumes had to pay a higher
rate. This model was widely copied by Mudie’s competitors and, for the
library’s wealthier clientele, it was also possible to have books delivered to
their country retreats, provided that they were willing to pay a carriage fee.
This arrangement offered authors of the most sought-after novels a very
good living – a year after publication, Mudie’s could boast that it owned
2,000 copies of Thomas Hughes’s classic tale of manly boyhood Tom
Brown’s Schooldays (1857), for instance – but the cut-throat economics of
library sales meant that many writers suffered. Although ‘a £10 profit was
worthwhile for the publisher when added to a similar profit on fifty other
novels’, even a figure of £20 was a derisory return for a novelist who would
16
have had to spend the best part of a year producing the often unnecessarily
lengthy manuscript that the triple-decker required.2 In New Grub Street,
one of Jasper Milvain’s favourite postures is to denounce melodramatically
this ‘triple-headed monster’ for ‘sucking the blood of English novelists’
(p. 203), and it is no accident that Gissing’s novel was itself published in
the standard three-volume format. Together, libraries and publishers oper-
ated as a virtual cartel, maintaining prices and regulating the form that
fiction took. Gissing firmly believed that this system was in crisis, but he
was intensely pessimistic about the possibility of a viable alternative. What
Gissing failed to foresee will be the subject of this chapter: the transform-
ation of publishing in the period between 1880 and 1914 and its impact
upon popular literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particu-
larly through the inception of the modern system of genre fiction.
Initially, the rise of the three-volume novel was a real success story, with
its roots in what would now be called an early bestseller. When Walter Scott
(1771–1832) brought out his first novel, Waverley, in 1814, its publication
put the author on the road to becoming one of the most popular nineteenth-
century writers, not only in Britain, but throughout Europe and North
America, and his halo did not fade until the close of the Edwardian era
nearly a hundred years later. Scott’s tale of a young English officer caught
up in the Scottish Jacobite rebellion of 1745 effectively inaugurated a
new literary form, the modern historical novel, with its panoramic social
reach and hazardous adventures; indeed, so powerful was its appeal, that
Waverley sold more copies, more quickly, than any previous work of fiction,
despite being priced at a guinea for each three-volume set, a sign of the
strength of demand among the rising number of readers eager for new
reading experiences. Sales continued to rise and by 1821 Waverley had sold
11,500 copies, with a new edition appearing at least once a year. But prices
rose inexorably too and 1821 also saw Scott’s work achieve a peak when his
novel Kenilworth went on sale at 31s 6d or a guinea and a half, a figure that
became the going rate for a triple-decker until its demise in the 1890s.3
Nevertheless, at these prohibitive prices – 31s 6d was roughly half the weekly
income of an average middle-class household – there was always going to be
a ceiling on individual sales of new fiction. Beginning in the 1840s and
1850s libraries like Mudie’s offered one way of satisfying demand without
sacrificing high prices, while the serialisation of fiction in newspapers, period-
icals, or popular magazines provided another. Cheap reprints were a third
alternative, a practice that became increasingly important in the second half
of the nineteenth century as publishers developed a complex mix of format
and pricing that radically extended the commercial life of the novel. By 1866,
just fifty years after the first edition of Waverley, the sixpenny Scott had
17
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arrived and in the following decade paperback copies of the Waverley novels
were being sold for as little as three pence each.
Before exploring these developments in greater detail, there is a more
fundamental point to be made. We take for granted our habit of reading the
latest fiction by contemporary authors, selecting from an abundance of new
books that are constantly appearing, but this expectation presupposes that
large numbers of novels are published each year. Before the nineteenth
century this was far from being the case: in 1788, for example, just eighty
new novels appeared in print (in stark contrast to the situation two hundred
years later, when the corresponding figure from the mid-1980s was just
under 5,500).4 What occurred in the Victorian era was nothing less than a
step change in the relationship between novels and their readers. Thus in
1808, in what might be thought of as the pre-Waverley phase, it has been
estimated that 111 new novels came onto the market, a figure that began to
increase sharply from 1830, rising to around 200 by 1840.5 These statistics
partly reflect the growing efficiency of production techniques. Although
machine presses and similar technological innovations in paper-making
and typesetting were adopted gradually and unevenly, by around 1830 their
cumulative effect was unmistakable.
Publication data from the final decades of the century are even more
dramatic: 380 new novels in 1880, more than doubling to 896 in 1886, and
climbing to 1,315 in 1895.6 Of course, the audience for these titles would
have been a relatively small percentage of an increasingly literate popula-
tion, restricted in terms of income and social class. But the overall trend
revealed by the nearly twelvefold increase between 1808 and 1895 suggests
that towards the end of this period the appetite for new fiction had not only
grown significantly, but had been revolutionised, with more people reading
new fiction than ever before. Moreover, the numbers of new titles published
is a fairly crude indicator of how far attitudes and practices had changed,
since they tell us little about the many ways in which fiction circulated (for
example, how texts were passed from one reader to another, or where and
when they were read aloud within families and other social groups); nor,
crucially, do these data help us to chart the dissemination of the desire for
novels among those strata of society that lacked the economic or cultural
capital to become members of Mudie’s or to run an account at Hatchard’s
bookshop in Piccadilly. What is indisputable, however, is that in the years
from 1860 to 1890, ‘literacy, leisure, and a little pocket-money’, the three
key conditions identified by Richard Altick as vital for the creation of
‘a mass reading public’, were becoming more widespread. A growth in the
regular consumption of fiction was a major consequence of this broad
socio-economic shift.7
18
But the notion of a mass market is somewhat misleading. For, though

the market for fiction was expanding, it was also highly stratified and
segmented. Some texts were definitely read by men and women from
opposite ends of the social spectrum. Scott was as much a favourite with
the university-educated children’s writer and dramatist J. M. Barrie as he
was with the self-improving coal miner or grocer’s boy, though the latter,
like the socialist activist Walter Hampson, would often tend to read Scott
against the distinctly conservative grain.8 But other kinds of fiction had a
massive following entirely among the working classes.
The work of the extraordinarily prolific G. W. M. Reynolds (1814–79)
provides a fascinating case study of the ‘literary machine’ that Gissing’s
character Marian Yule feared that she might become – indeed, one acquaint-
ance actually described Reynolds ‘wrapped in a dingy dressing-gown,
and perched on a stool at a high desk, writing away like a steam engine’.9
Reynolds came from a naval family but broke with this tradition, drifted
into journalism and published his first novel in Paris in 1835; however, it
was not until he returned to London that he began writing the commercially
successful serials that were to make his name. Reynolds’s early attempts at
serial-writing are instructive. While in France he had edited the Paris
Literary Gazette and once back in London he took up the post of editor
of the Monthly Magazine of Politics, Literature and the Belles-Lettres for
which he began writing an irreverent and completely unapproved sequel
to Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, boosting the journal’s circulation,
but costing him his job. Unabashed, Reynolds continued to use the serial
form, publishing another Dickens pastiche (in which Pickwick and his
friends became teetotallers), before launching the series that is now recog-
nised as ‘the most widely read bestseller of the century’, under the title The
Mysteries of London.10 For a penny, readers could buy weekly instalments
with woodcut illustrations, and in the first year of publication alone,
Reynolds is reckoned to have sold some 40,000 copies per week (whereas
instalments of Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son sold 40,000 per month).11
The series appeared regularly between October 1844 and September 1848
and for those who missed crucial issues and wanted to catch up there were
sixpenny monthly reprints, plus annual volumes that collected together the
whole story.
What were The Mysteries of London? Reynolds’s stock-in-trade was his
lurid portrayal of the underside of the capital, imagined as a labyrinth of
narratives that revealed the secret lives and tribulations of Londoners,
high and low. So, the Prologue cautions the reader that: ‘the lazar house,
the prison, the brothel, and the dark alley, are rife with all kinds of enor-
mity’, just as ‘the palace, the mansion, the club-house, the parliament, and
19
david glover
the parsonage, are each and all characterised by their different degrees
and shades of vice’.12 As melodramatic proof, the story begins on an
appropriately ‘dark and stormy night’ in the insalubrious neighbourhood
of Smithfield Market where an unnamed youth takes shelter from the rain in
a deserted, unlit house, a perilous place whose walls conceal sliding panels
and where a blood-stained knife lies ominously close to a trapdoor covering
a well-staircase going down to the River Fleet. But after a few pages the
narrative breaks off and starts to fragment. Reynolds’s prose moves swiftly
forward, summarily abandoning one storyline and picking up another,
reluctant to patch up any lacunae or stay with any single character too
long. Consider the following extract:
‘Now, my lad,’ cried the Resurrection Man, ‘your fate is decided. In a few
minutes you’ll be at the bottom of the canal, and then –’
He said no more – for at that moment another person appeared upon the
scene; and, quick as thought, the Resurrection Man was felled by the butt
end of a pistol.
But the instant the miscreant touched the ground, he caught a desperate hold of
the person who had so suddenly and unexpectedly appeared upon the spot;
and Filippo – for it was he – also rolled on the damp sward. (vol. I, p. 322)
Here each sentence constructs a false climax which is immediately reversed

by the next, the narration continually interrupting itself and rendering the
roles and identities of the characters opaque and unstable. This brutal
confrontation is the city in microcosm.
Reynolds’s reliance upon cliffhangers, their outcomes suspended over
many short chapters, is integral both to the structure of his fiction and to
the commodity-form it takes. The reader’s expectations are constantly being
thwarted and, just as one turns the page in order to find out what happens
next, so it is necessary to purchase the next issue if one is to keep abreast
of the narrative. Numerous plots and sub-plots are set in motion, delivered
in brief episodic chunks, the abrupt alternation between scenes produc-
ing a kind of urban montage that jumps from Smithfield to Islington, or
Brick Lane to Buckingham Palace, from one kind of residence to another.
Characters appear, disappear, and reappear, taking on new guises as they do
so, the elegantly attired gentleman turning out to be a card-sharp and a
swindler, while the most unredeemed ruffian is the man who delivers the
hero from his worst enemy. Reynolds’s endlessly fluid social imaginary is a
vast web of intersecting and interconnected incidents and careers, in which
no coincidence is too extraordinary, and where the clichéd return from the
dead can mean exactly that – in one Frankensteinian incident a hanged man
is brought back to life by having an electric current passed through him. The
20
line between fact and fiction or social reportage and sheer fantasy is not so
much blurred as placed under erasure. As in the popular miscellanies that
Reynolds also compiled, different modes of writing can be found between
the same covers. Alongside the thrills and spills, the reader learns how to
switch from an unloaded to a loaded set of dice or how to select particular
cards from a deck that has been shuffled – all with the aid of graphic
illustrations.
Reynolds’s success was part of a much wider phenomenon. The general
model (including the title) for The Mysteries of London was suggested by
Eugène Sue’s spectacularly popular Les Mystères de Paris (1842–3) –
whose title had in turn been adapted from Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Reynolds had undoubtedly read Sue
during his time in France where it was published as a roman feuilleton, a
novel that was published in twice-weekly instalments in a daily newspaper,
but he was not alone in seizing on the possibilities held out by this
remarkable fiction. Indeed, Sue’s juxtaposition of urban poverty, criminal
subcultures and upper-class decadence produced a narrative formula that
was copied everywhere throughout the 1840s and beyond. In France there
were Les Mystères de Rouen (1845) and Les Mystères de Marseilles
(written by Émile Zola in 1867), in Spain Misterios de Madrid (1846), in
Germany Die Geheimnisse von Berlin (1845) in Italy I misteri di Firenze
(1857), and the craze quickly crossed the Atlantic to inspire ‘mysteries’ of
several small working-class cities on the East Coast in the mid-forties (such
as Lowell, Troy and Worcester), as well as George Lippard’s much-
reprinted The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall. A Romance of
Philadelphia Life, Mystery and Crime (1844–5), before reaching Manhat-
tan with the publication of Ned Buntline’s The Mysteries and Miseries of
New York in 1848. The lines of influence are complex and cannot all be
traced directly back to Sue, however: Lippard’s Quaker City was trans-
lated into German and read by Germans both in their home country and as
immigrants to America, where they could also read German language
‘mysteries of the city’ set in St Louis and Cincinnati. Moreover, Lippard
and Buntline were pioneering figures in the development of cheap popular
fiction in America through the medium of dime novels (sometimes known
as ‘pamphlet novels’) and story papers (which followed the ‘miscellany’
format adopted by Reynolds).13 And Reynolds was an important influence
in his own right: Bengali translations of The Mysteries of London enjoyed
considerable popularity in nineteenth-century imperial India and, begin-
ning in the early 1870s, generated an indigenous school of imitators who
combined Reynoldsian sensationalism with traditional Bengali literary
devices and motifs.14
21
david glover
As these ‘mysteries of the city’ spread, they diversified and changed tack.
Sue’s roman feuilleton had an audience that included the king and his
ministers and cut right across the French class structure, even resulting in
public readings of the story in cafés and workshops for the benefit of the
unlettered. However, the newspaper on whose front page Les Mystères de
Paris first appeared was the highly conservative Journal des Débats and, if
Sue was able to draw in readers from among the urban poor, the core of his
following was solidly middle class. Although Sue seems to have been
radicalised by the success of his own writing, later entering politics as a
representative for a working-class district of Paris, his novel was essen-
tially the tale of the world being put to rights without the need for a
political revolution. Sue’s hero Rodolphe is an aristocrat, a grand-duke
no less, who moves through the Parisian underworld in disguise, visiting
rough vigilante justice upon those miscreants who are too villainous to be
redeemed, as in the notorious scene in which he has David, the former
slave who is now Rodolphe’s personal physician, blind the evil Maı̂tre
d’École. Without sight, the Maı̂tre d’École’s criminal days are over and
this once intimidating figure is forced to beg others for help. But this
terrifying image of an individual taking the law into his own hands
appalled some powerful members of the conservative establishment and
led to the imposition of a special tax on newspapers that featured a roman
feuilleton, reining in Sue’s runaway success.
Differences in political culture meant that nothing like this fate ever befell
George Reynolds. His protagonist Richard Markham starts out as a respect-
able bourgeois who becomes the victim of sleek aristocratic conmen and
rapacious common criminals and by the second volume the shock at how
London constantly produces crime and destitution has turned him into a
philanthropist who walks the streets looking for miserable wretches to
help. Yet the tone of The Mysteries of London was far more militant than
Markham’s paternalism suggests. For the stance taken by the Reynolds
narrator is overtly didactic: ‘we have constituted ourselves the scourge of
the oppressor’, he announces grandly at the close of the first volume, and
‘we seek the company of them that drag the chains of tyranny along the
rough thoroughfares of the world, that we may put the tyrant to shame’
(p. 416). What gives these stories their populist political character is a vivid
sense that the State and the aristocracy work hand in glove, ensuring that
there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. Although Reynolds
champions the cause of industrial labour, it is the aristocrat and not the
capitalist who is depicted as the source of misery and hardship here, sug-
gesting that his fictions are more attuned to the eighteenth-century past than
to the changing realities of nineteenth-century urbanisation. The roots of
22
the prurience and disgust that colour The Mysteries of London are to be
found in upper-class corruption rather than in any organised system of
economic exploitation.
The discussion so far suggests a division, almost a polarisation, between
two incommensurable zones of popular fiction: among the respectable
middle classes are the novels available via the circulating libraries, while
at the other extreme one finds the lurid cityscape represented by Reynolds’s
Mysteries with its large proletarian readership. But, as the example of
Scott’s Waverley also reveals, one of the most important characteristics of
popular writing is its mobility, the way in which its narratives are able to
move between different audiences. And in the case of the ‘mysteries of the
city’ that began with Eugène Sue, we see a constellation of texts than are
initially the preserve of the French middle class, but which then reach out
to plebeian readers not just in France, but throughout continental Europe,
and on to Britain and the United States. Meanwhile, in India, the writer
Bhubanchandra Mukhopādhyāy imaginatively inflected Reynolds’s narra-
tive so that it formed a critique of ‘the supposedly superior imperial race’
with its lack of regard for local Bengali customs and mores.15
At the same time, the world of the circulating libraries was far less stable
than is often supposed. When Mudie’s ran into financial difficulties in 1863,
a group of publishers put up the lion’s share of the money that kept it afloat
as a limited liability company.16 At the other extreme, the drive to maximise
profits led the commercial library W. H. Smith into new areas of business
that would radically transform bookselling and with it the very nature of the
book. In 1848, the firm started to rent bookstalls from the British railway
companies, turning them decisively towards the sale of fiction, including
special railway series like those published by Routledge and Bentley that
capitalised on the growing demand for reprints. By 1862, Smiths had
entered into ‘a discreet arrangement with Chapman and Hall’ to bring out
their own line of reprints, featuring R. D. Blackmore’s historical novels,
Charles Lever’s tales of Irish military men, and Ouida’s romances, highly
saleable books with ‘a wide appeal across class and gender lines’.17 Railway
travel put a premium on the portability of the fiction that was on sale at
station bookstalls, making the affordable single-volume reprint particularly
attractive to buyers. Portability was also a matter of weight and design.
In 1849, Routledge started to produce a railway imprint bound in glazed
paper boards, at one or two shillings a copy, small enough to be ‘slipped
inside a greatcoat pocket’, and soon to be known by the generic name of
‘yellowbacks’ after the trademark colour of their eye-catching covers.18 By
the mid-1860s this type of novel was being undercut by another innovation:
paperbound reprints at sixpence each. In a sense, this new product marked
23
david glover
the beginning of the long paperback revolution that reached its peak world-
wide in the 1950s and 1960s, not simply because these were the first
paperbound books ever to appear, but because the railway paperback
represented a low-price format that was being put before a public engaged
in other everyday activities. Later incarnations of the type of literary com-
modity that first sought new readers through the medium of the railway
bookstall were eventually to be found in newsagents, drugstores, supermar-
kets, airports and other general retail outlets such as Woolworth’s.
The tension between the ever-cheaper formats devised for reprints and the
high fixed price of the triple-decker was finally resolved by the death of the
latter. In an attempt to control costs, two of the major circulating libraries,
Mudie’s and W. H. Smith’s, informed publishers on 27 June 1894 that in
future they would only pay a maximum of four shillings for each new
volume of fiction. Faced with a drop in the number of potential subscribers,
Mudie’s and Smith’s also attempted to slow the rapidly diminishing shelf-
life of their books and to reduce competition from increasingly affordable
reprints by pressing publishers not to bring out cheap editions of any of the
titles they had sold to the libraries for at least a year – a clash that parallels
the twenty-first-century conflict between cinema chains and film companies
over the appropriate time-lag between the first showing of a movie and its
availability on DVD. But in 1894 the triple-decker was already living on
borrowed time and by 1897 it was virtually extinct, a victim of long-term
changes in the structure of the fiction market. What had happened?
Two trends stand out. The first was that the number of single-volume
novels had been gradually increasing since the 1880s, not just reprints of
books that had originally been published as triple-deckers, but new
works of fiction. This was no recipe for instant success. In Gissing’s New
Grub Street, the hapless character Reardon tries to publish a one-volume
potboiler in a last-ditch attempt to change his luck, only to have it rejected.
But this episode is another sign of the depth of Gissing’s disillusion with
commercial publishing. When H. Rider Haggard’s She appeared in book
form in 1887, Gissing was outraged to discover that Mudie’s was planning
to stock many more copies of this popular imperial adventure story than of
his own novel Thyrza.19 This news was a double blow, for in addition to
being a sloppy, sub-literary author in Gissing’s eyes, Rider Haggard was
among those enterprising writers who were starting to shun the triple-
decker altogether, preferring instead to publish single-volume first editions,
priced at the reprint rate of five or six shillings. In September 1885, for
example, Cassell – the firm which had successfully published Robert Louis
Stevenson’s pirate story Treasure Island (1883) in one volume – brought out
Rider Haggard’s first African bestseller King Solomon’s Mines in an initial
24
print run of 2,000 copies. In twelve months over fifteen times this number
had been sold and Rider Haggard’s fortunes went from strength to strength.
So unquenchable was the thirst for stories featuring his big-game hunter
hero Allan Quatermain that three years later he sold 20,000 copies of the
now forgotten Maiwa’s Revenge on the day that it was published.20
The second trend to impact upon the publishing industry was a substantial
rise in the numbers and social significance of periodicals that gave pride
of place to all manner of fiction, streamlining and intensifying the reliance
on serialisation that had been in play since at least the early decades of
the century. During the period from 1880 to the outbreak of the Second
World War many of the most popular novels first appeared as serials in these
new weekly and monthly magazines. Instalments of H. Rider Haggard’s She
were published in The Graphic (1886), H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds
in Pearson’s Magazine and The Invisible Man in Pearson’s Weekly (both in
1897), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in Cassell’s Magazine (1901), while in October
1912 the first of Sax Rohmer’s stories built around the Oriental master
criminal Dr Fu-Manchu was published in The Story-Teller (and collected into
The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu the following year). American magazines
were also an important source of income for popular writers, and a few
had British editions: Lippincott’s Magazine serialised Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of the Four in 1890 (alongside Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray), while Harper’s Monthly published George du
Maurier’s extraordinary bestseller Trilby in instalments in 1894. These are
narratives that have had an extremely long history, endlessly reprinted,
adapted and re-imagined for stage, radio and cinema, from the Orson Welles
radio dramatisation of The War of the Worlds that caused a mass panic in the
United States in 1938 to the re-invention of Sherlock Holmes in Guy Ritchie’s
2009 film of that name, starring Jude Law as Holmes and Robert Downey
Jr as Dr Watson. Texts like these continue to supply some of the essential
co-ordinates of the modern genre system.
Broadly speaking, the market-leaders were general-interest magazines like
The Strand Magazine, The London Magazine and The Windsor Magazine,
publications that used good-quality paper, offering articles as well as
fiction, accompanied by photographs and a variety of illustrations. They
were primarily aimed at middle-class families, but their sixpenny cover
price (sometimes a little less) put them within the reach of huge audiences.
The most influential of these magazines was undoubtedly The Strand,
particularly through its championing of the short story, initially relying
on translations of Continental writers like Guy de Maupasssant or
Alphonse Daudet, tempered with a few British writers like Grant Allen
and E. W. Hornung, before striking gold when it began to publish a series
25
david glover
of Sherlock Holmes stories in July 1891. For the next sixty years, The
Strand was indelibly associated with Conan Doyle’s phenomenally popular
detective, and even Holmes’s ‘death’ at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893 only
intensified the enthusiasm for his exploits. When the first instalment of The
Hound of the Baskervilles appeared in August 1901, a novel supposedly set
before the detective’s demise, the issue ‘went into seven printings and there
were queues around the block outside its offices’.21 The Strand’s circulation
virtually doubled overnight. The evident success of The Strand’s marketing
strategy led other publishers to try to push its central idea further. And so,
in April 1905, C. Arthur Pearson launched Britain’s first all-fiction maga-
zine in an endeavour to exploit the new vogue for short stories that The
Strand and its rivals had in effect created. The Novel Magazine was a rather
more downmarket type of monthly than George Newnes’s Strand. At four
pence a copy it was a less expensive, but also a more functional product,
printed on cheap standard pulp, without illustrations of any kind. Never-
theless, The Novel Magazine ran for over thirty years and during this
time it published some of the most famous authors of the day, including
Agatha Christie, Elinor Glyn, R. Austin Freeman, Baroness Orczy, Sax
Rohmer, Edgar Wallace, P. G. Wodehouse, to cite just a few. It had many
imitators: The Story-Teller and The Red Magazine were among The Novel
Magazine’s immediate competitors and they were joined after the First
World War by such titles as Hutchinson’s Story Magazine and All-Story
Magazine. In October 1924 pulp met pulp, when the American firm Double-
day brought out a British edition of one of their own pulp magazines called
The Frontier, largely devoted to cowboy stories.22
What made these kinds of genre fiction so popular? Often the answers to
this question have focused upon the cultural work that these narratives
performed in the socio-historical moment within which they appeared.
Looking at the example of the Sherlock Holmes stories that were a regular
feature in The Strand between 1891 and 1892, one can argue that they made
the social world seem a safer place for the magazine’s predominantly middle-
class readers, a place where no criminal could, in principle, go undetected.
Case by case, Holmes’s investigations reinforced a set of moral boundaries
that were supported by racial or eugenic categories. In ‘The Adventure of
the Speckled Band’, for example, the heroine Helen Stoner is at the mercy of
her murderous stepfather ‘who is the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon
families in England’, a family that has been ruined by the ‘dissolute and
wasteful disposition’ of ‘four successive heirs’.23 Strikingly, the threat that
this sinister paterfamilias poses is routed through imperial India where
he had worked as a doctor in Calcutta before returning in disgrace to the
family estate in Surrey with ‘no friends at all save the wandering gypsies’
26
and his collection of Indian animals, including a cheetah, ‘which wander

freely over his grounds’ (p. 260). Here, as Uri Eisenzweig has observed, ‘Orient
and animality intersect in the peripheral origin of a mysterious crime.’24
However, Conan Doyle’s writing changed substantially as a result of
being taken up by this popular family magazine. Before 1891 he was an
ambitious but not particularly successful author, seeking to improve his
position in what Peter McDonald – drawing on the influential sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu – has called ‘the literary field in the 1890s’.25 Within this
extended network of writers, publishers, literary agents, newspapers and
periodicals, Conan Doyle had struggled to find an outlet for his first
Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet (1887), before its acceptance by
Ward, Lock & Co., a firm specialising in cheap fiction. Not only did the
company refuse to agree to a royalty payment, but it also delayed publi-
cation and forced him to sell them the British copyright on their own terms.
After publication in one of their Christmas annuals, Ward, Lock reprinted
the novel as a ‘shilling dreadful’, chiefly available on railway bookstalls.
As McDonald’s detailed case study of Conan Doyle’s literary career
shows, the author’s new lease of life in The Strand involved him in a
complex repudiation of this experience necessitating a practice of writing
that invoked the lurid conventions of the ‘shilling dreadful’, while simul-
taneously distancing himself from them. Thus, in The Sign of the Four
(1890), published just prior to his move to The Strand, Conan Doyle depicts
Holmes and Watson peering through a keyhole at the face of a dead man,
his head apparently ‘suspended . . . in the air’, his ‘bloodless’ features set ‘in
a horrible smile, a fixed and unnatural grin’, paralysed by the poison dart of
an Andaman Islander – a scene that might not have been out of place in The
Mysteries of London (p. 109). At the climax of the novel, after a hectic
chase down the Thames, Holmes shoots the ‘savage, distorted creature’
responsible for the murder, ‘a little black man’ whose ‘thick lips were
writhed back from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with half
animal fury’ (p. 138). Months later, when Holmes encounters ‘the deadliest
snake in India’ in the pages of The Strand, he adroitly throws a noose
around the swamp adder’s head and simply deposits the reptile in a safe
where it can do no more harm (p. 272). By deliberately pruning back the
more sensational excesses of the earlier Holmes narratives, Conan Doyle
was adjusting his style in line with The Strand’s desire to replace the
gruesome imagery of such working-class staples as the ‘penny dreadfuls’
and the Illustrated Police News with a more sober and more rational
approach to crime and criminality.
From a longer-term perspective, the stylisation of the Sherlock Holmes
stories played a key role in the consolidation of the system of genre fiction
27
david glover
that remains with us today, just as Bram Stoker’s Dracula provided a

template for the modern vampire novel and H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds
was the first of many invasions from outer space. Franco Moretti has argued
that what distinguished Conan Doyle’s crime narratives from Sherlock
Holmes’s many competitors was his development of a central literary device:
the clue. Whereas in early detective stories the identification of clues was
simply a proof of the sleuth’s superior investigative skills, the presence of
clues gradually came to take the form of a puzzle that was addressed to the
reader, producing a contest in which the devotee of detective fiction attempts
to unravel the crime before the final solution is announced. Although the
Sherlock Holmes stories did not always measure up to this exacting model,
Conan Doyle popularised the notion of ‘a potential parity’ between the
detective and the reader, a conceit that assumes both are engaged in a
common enterprise.26 According to Moretti, it is this feature that explains
why contemporaries of Conan Doyle like Guy Boothby or Frank R. Stockton,
detective story writers who played fast and loose with clues, are now almost
completely forgotten; and it is the strength of the expectation that the reader
should have a fair chance of solving the mystery that explains the frustration
aroused by Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), where a
figure who played the role of Dr Watson turned out to be the author of the
crime. The vicissitudes of the clue offers a prime example of the way in which
the tight link between narrative form and specific kinds of readerly pleasure
that is synonymous with genre fiction falls into place. Between 1890, when
Holmes first graced the pages of The Strand, and 1920, when the detective
Hercules Poirot made his appearance in Christie’s first novel The Mysterious
Affair at Styles, the ‘whodunit’ became the most widely read form of popular
entertainment. Their descendants still are: crime novels currently account for
nearly 60 per cent of genre fiction sales.27
Although some historians trace the origins of genre fiction as far back as
‘the Gothick novels of the eighteenth century’, it is the 1890s that are most
frequently adduced as the moment when the architecture of the genre
system in its recognisably modern form took shape.28 Detective stories like
those of Conan Doyle or, later, Christie were ‘mysteries’ in a far more
specialised sense than anything to be found in Reynolds’s The Mysteries of
London where crime, passion, sensation and a generous dose of the Gothic,
were all part of a chaotically melodramatic series of adventures whose sole
rationale was to carry the reader from one point of suspense to another.
Gothic horror might be woven into a ‘whodunit’, as it was in The Hound of
the Baskervilles, but it is merely a ruse for intensifying the difficulty of
solving a crime and will be explained away once the murderer is discovered.
Genre categories tend to be highly (if not absolutely) differentiated from
28
each other, and this process of segmentation is why the emergence of

‘distinct’ types of narrative like ‘the detective novel, the adventure story,
the sex novel, science fiction, even the spy novel’ in the 1890s can be
described as a ‘grid’ or system.29 These largely familiar labels are the
precursors of the subdivisions of genre fiction used to organise the shelves
of twenty-first-century bookshops – romances and sagas, crime and thrillers,
horror and ghost stories, sci-fi and fantasy, erotic fiction, Westerns, war
fiction and historical novels – genres that accounted for nearly half the British
adult fiction market in 2008, totalling more than 37 million books.30
But it would be a mistake to assimilate the ‘grid’ of the 1890s too quickly
to what Moretti has dubbed ‘the super-niches’ of the contemporary popular
fiction market.31 For not only have the forms of popular fiction continued
to undergo considerable internal development throughout the twentieth
century, but also the promotional strategies adopted by publishers have
constantly been adjusted to meet the exigencies of the market. Consider
two very different examples from the interwar years. In the early 1930s, the
directors of the failing firm of Mills & Boon decided to try to revive their
fortunes by specialising as publishers of women’s romances. Their distinc-
tive selling point was to make the new Mills & Boon brand a guarantee
that their books were free from any hint of impropriety, in stark contrast
to the intensity of the sex novel in previous decades when titles like Elinor
Glynn’s Three Weeks (1907) and E. M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919) had
explored the thrilling pursuit of sexuality for its own sake, before and
beyond the confines of marriage. In Hull’s desert romance, for instance,
kidnapping and rape had served as the prologue to true love and the
fantasy of inter-racial desire was indulged, only to be finally neutralised
by the revelation that the heroine’s captor, Ahmed Ben Hassan, was not a
Bedouin at all, but an Englishman with a Spanish mother.
Nevertheless, the gap between this kind of novel and Mills & Boon’s
official policy was not always as wide as the editors wanted the reading
public to believe, since the firm employed writers like Mary Burchell and
Denise Robins who took risks with the romance formula from the outset.
However, although Burchell’s bestselling first novel Wife to Christopher
(1936) includes such transgressive ingredients as sexual violence and an
illegitimate child, the story ends happily ever after in a respectable com-
panionate marriage to a wealthy and attractive man.32 Because the function
of the brand was precisely to contain the designs of the individual author,
the Mills & Boon name has long outlasted the ephemeral successes of any of
the books it has published.
By contrast, Hodder & Stoughton’s ‘Yellow Jackets’ series adopted what
was virtually the opposite approach to Mills & Boon. These distinctively
29
david glover
packaged hardbacks were new popular novels sold at the then standard
reprint price of two shillings. More importantly, Hodder & Stoughton
decisively moved away from the nineteenth-century business model based
on small print runs that could be reprinted as often as necessary towards
large print runs of a limited number of titles. The company in effect created
a version of the Hollywood star system that was tailored to publishing,
putting most of its promotional energies behind a few major authors, their
biggest seller being the thriller writer Edgar Wallace, whose nightmare
cliffhangers and lurid sensationalism made him a distant successor to
G. W. M. Reynolds. Like Hodder’s other ‘stars’, each Wallace title sported
a trademark logo, a crimson circle inscribed with his signature in black ink,
and below it the slogan: ‘It is impossible not to be thrilled by Edgar
Wallace.’ Hodder & Stoughton aggressively targeted specially selected
outlets, particularly the commercial libraries and bookshops owned by
W. H. Smith – so much so that the latter became known amongst the
publisher’s rivals as ‘Hodder & Stoughton depots’ – and exhorted their
customers to ‘Make this an Edgar Wallace year.’33 Every inch the profes-
sional writer and unflaggingly prolific, Wallace had learned the discipline of
deadlines while working as a reporter for the Daily Mail, and with the aid of
his dictaphone he could polish off an 80,000 word novel in a weekend,
earning a reputation as a ‘human book-factory’.34 But if this ‘King of
Thrillers’ is a figure from the past whose roots lie in the nineteenth-century
potboiler (the modernist Gertrude Stein once compared him to Sir Walter
Scott), Wallace is also a readily identifiable prototype of today’s bestselling
author: the writer as celebrity, as household name, a denizen of the culture
industry, diversifying his output into articles, short stories, serials, novels,
drama, filmscripts and even attempting (for once, quite disastrously) to
enter politics. For one of the lessons of Wallace’s phenomenal success in
the 1920s, when he was the Jeffrey Archer or Dan Brown of his day, is that
this literary engine was ultimately inseparable from another, equally unstop-
pable system of production, the engine of mass publicity.
NOTES
1 George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. John Goode (Oxford University Press, 1993),
p. 9. All further page references are included in the text.
2 Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street
(Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 207.
3 David McKitterick (ed.), in ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge History of the Book in
Britain. Vol. vi: 1830–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 6.
4 Michele Field, The Publishing Industry (London: Comedia, 1986), p. 13; Claire
Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain
30
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 25. In 2005, more new titles were
published in the UK than in any other country when the annual total (including
both fiction and non-fiction) passed the 200,000 mark.
5 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History
(London: Verso, 2005), pp. 7–8.
6 Patrick Leary and Andrew Nash, ‘Authorship’, in McKitterick, Cambridge
History of the Book, p. 199.
7 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass
Reading Public, 1800–1900 (University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 306.
8 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 40–1.
9 John Ross Dix, Lions: Living and Dead, or Personal Recollections of the Great
and the Gifted (London: Partridge & Oakey, 1852), p. 282.
10 Anne Humphries and Louis James, eds., ‘Introduction’, in G. W. M. Reynolds:
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2008), p. 7.
11 Simon Dentith, ‘How Popular Was Dombey and Son?’, The Dickensian 88:2
(Summer 1992): 69.
12 G. W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London (1845; London: John Dicks, 1867.
4 vols.), vol. i, p. 2. All further page references are included in the text.
13 For further details, see Donald Sassoon, The Culture of the Europeans: From
1800 to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 2006), pp. 373–83 and Michael
Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America
(London: Verso, 1987), ch. 6.
14 Sucheta Bhattacharya, ‘G. W. M. Reynolds: Rewritten in Nineteenth-Century
Bengal’, in Humphries and James, G. W. M. Reynolds, pp. 249–60.
15 Bhattacharya, ‘G. W. M. Reynolds’, p. 258.
16 Sassoon, Culture of the Europeans, p. 297.
17 Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in
England, 1880–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 74–5.
18 Simon Eliot and Andrew Nash, ‘Mass Markets: Literature’, in McKitterick,
Cambridge History of the Book, p. 422.
19 Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918
(Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 678.
20 Morton N. Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works (New York: Walker &
Co., 1960), p. 232.
21 Christopher Frayling, ‘Introduction’, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the
Baskervilles (1902; London: Penguin, 2001), p. xii.
22 For a comprehensive survey of the development of fiction magazines, see
Mike Ashley, The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines
1880–1950 (London: The British Library, 2006).
23 ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Penguin
Complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 259. All
further page references are embodied in the text.
24 Uri Eisenzweig, ‘Madness and the Colonies: French and Anglo-Saxon Versions of
the Mysterious Origins of Crime’, L’Esprit Créateur 26:2 (Summer 1986): 9.
25 Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914
(Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 4.
31
david glover
26 Franco Moretti, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, Modern Language Quarterly

61:1 (March 2000): 216.
27 Anna Chambers, ‘The Information: Genre Fiction Sales’, FT Weekend Magazine,
18/19 April (2009): 14.
28 John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Croom Helm, 1988),
p. 233.
29 Cross, The Common Writer, p. 221.
30 Anna Chambers, ‘The Information: Genre Fiction Sales’, p. 14.
31 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, p. 8.
32 See Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 116–19.
33 See David Glover, ‘Looking for Edgar Wallace: The Author as Consumer’,
History Workshop Journal 37 (Spring 1994): 143–64.
34 Graham Greene, ‘Edgar Wallace’ (1964), in Collected Essays (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970), p. 171.
32
2
N I C H O L A S D A LY
Fiction, theatre and early cinema
It was widely averred in the nineteenth century that the novel was the
century’s dominant form; indeed, at the end of this period critics spoke of
the ‘tyranny’ of the novel. But this was only a partial truth, insofar as for
much of this period the novel maintained complicated symbiotic relation-
ships with other cultural forms, particularly drama: in this respect, popular
plots, characters and settings were amphibious, gliding from novel to stage,
and, more rarely, from stage to novel. The reading of novels aloud in the
family home was an aspect of Victorian literary culture that already con-
tained elements of theatricality, and this was still more the case with the
commercially run, public readings that swelled the finances of popular novel-
ists, notably Dickens. But by the time audiences heard Dickens read from his
favourite works (the death of Nancy from Oliver Twist (1837–9) was his tour
de force) many of them would have already seen full, sometimes unauthor-
ised, dramatic adaptations of the same texts: Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) as
Smike; The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) as Dot; other novels and shorter
pieces under their original titles. The work of other novelists, from Bulwer
Lytton, to Elizabeth Gaskell, to M. E. Braddon, was also quickly revamped
for the stage; the vogue of ‘sensation’ in the 1860s coincides with an especially
lively period of adaptation, as the reign of the Newgate Novel had in the 1830s
and 1840s. While the Victorian appetite for dramatised novels is well docu-
mented, we know less about the novelisation or ‘novella-isation’ of successful
plays: examples include Tom Taylor’s 1863 The Ticket-of-Leave Man, rewritten
as Bob Brierly; or, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, A Romance of the Present Day
(n.d.), and Dion Boucicault’s After Dark (1868), both of which were rewritten
by Henry Llewellyn Williams.1 This cross-fertilisation among contemporaneous
popular modes was further complicated at the latter end of the long nineteenth
century by what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin term ‘remediation’, when
a number of new entertainment apparatuses – the kinetoscope, the cinemato-
graph and the mutoscope, inter alia – raided popular fiction and drama in search
of both form and content.2
33
nicholas daly
There is a further set of interchanges to be borne in mind: the narratives

and images that circulated promiscuously among forms were part of a
transatlantic popular culture as well as a national one. Although often
treated separately, the literary histories of Britain and America are tightly
intertwined in this period, to the extent that one can speak of a transatlantic
Anglophone market, notwithstanding the conflicts over copyright, or
perhaps, indeed, because of the lack of copyright protection and the prolif-
eration of pirated editions. There are some notable examples of works that
enjoyed massive success on both sides of the Atlantic: Dickens provides,
again, many instances, including The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1); Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was a transatlantic success from
the other direction.3 In both cases, dramatic adaptations were as popular as,
or more popular than, the fictional originals. But popular materials also
jumped the language barrier: the Anglophone novel and the Anglophone
stage were heavily dependent on their French equivalents for material, and
popular plots, situations and spectacles flitted among Paris, New York and
London, as well as a host of smaller urban nodes. A similar internationalism
would later characterise early cinema.
Interacting in complex ways with the novel/drama/film continuum were
other forms of entertainment. The spectacles that dominated the Victorian
stage, enlivened popular fiction and became a staple of early film produc-
tion were at least in part derived from such popular forms as the special-
effects-driven shows that amused the crowds at the Victorian pleasure
gardens, the dioramas and the minor theatres. I will conclude this chapter
with an account of one important strand of this visual tradition, the imagin-
ation of disaster.
Tales of the city

The heavy traffic between the stage and fiction, and among French, British
and American materials, was already evident in the pre- and early-Victorian
periods. Its international aspect was, of course, predicated on the shared
metropolitan experiences of its audiences. The lived realities of the early
nineteenth-century city – overcrowding and immiseration; concentrations
of wealth and the creation of urban pleasure grounds and shopping districts;
sanitation problems and sanitary reform; the crowd and the scope for cross-
class performance; anonymous crime and modern policing – were inter-
national phenomena, notwithstanding local differences. To this extent it is
not surprising that a number of distinctly urban novels and plays enjoyed
success in the cities of an emerging global cultural network. Thus we
can trace the influence of Pierce Egan’s light-hearted novel of high and
34
low society, Life in London (1821) and its many stage versions on the
more melodramatic French play, Édouard Brisebarre and Eugène Nus’s
Les Bohémiens de Paris; this in turn was reimported into Britain as William
Moncrieff’s The Scamps of London (1843), which provided the basic
armature for a number of later narratives about the low-life deeps of
London, including Boucicault’s After Dark (1868) and its novelisation.4
In New York, The Bohemians of Paris appeared at the National Theatre
in December, 1858, and the Scamps of London at the Old Bowery Theatre
in February, 1863. It was not until 1873 that the play was fully ‘localised’
(a contemporary term: see ‘Theatrical’, New York Times, 20 September
1868) by J. J. Wallace as The Beats of New York. As the reviewer put it:
Mr Wallace’s adaptation metamorphoses the vagrants of the French capital

into rather freely drawn specimens of the parasites of New York, while the
language of the poor and populous quartiers of Paris is exchanged for the
slang of the hour in the Paris of America. The plot, however, is retained, and
when we say it is of the order of plots supplied to all plays in which humanity
is divided into two portions, with the most virtuous people in the world on one
side and the most villainous on the further, we are satisfied the reader will care
for no further enlightenment.5
Simultaneous internationalisation and localisation was also the fate of

Brisebarre and Nus’s Les Pauvres de Paris (1856), which became
Boucicault’s Poor of New York (1857), during the latter’s sojourn in that
city; when he returned to Europe Boucicault re-localised it in such versions
as The Poor of Liverpool (1864), and The Streets of London (1864), with
appropriate touches of local colour.
The same sharp divisions of good and evil that the New York Times
identified in The Beats of New York also characterised Eugène Sue’s
feuilleton, Les Mystères de Paris, another seminal influence on the popular
representation of the city. (Richard Maxwell argues that Victor Hugo’s
Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) is the first of the city-as-mystery narratives,
but Sue innovates by setting his serial in the present, and by explicitly
dwelling on the mystery element.)6 Published serially in the Journal des
Débats from 1842 to 1843, the Mysteries represents the city as a place in
which civilised society thinly conceals a mirror-world of savagery. The
narrator describes himself as another Fenimore Cooper (‘le Walter Scott
Américain’), but the savages he describes will be in our midst, not on the
frontiers:
les barbares dont nous parlons sont au milieu de nous; nous pouvons les
coudoyer en nous aventurant dans les repaires où ils vivent, où ils se rassemb-
lent pour concerter le meurtre, le vol, pour se partager enfin les dépouilles de
35
nicholas daly
leurs victimes. [the barbarians of which we speak are among us; we can rub
shoulders with them by venturing into their dens, where they gather to plot
murder and theft, and to divvy up the scalps of their victims]7
The hero of Sue’s lurid narrative is Rodolphe, an aristocrat in disguise who

does indeed venture into the haunts of the criminal tribes. There, like the
urban explorer of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor,
or an undercover cop in a twentieth-century police drama, he encounters a
wide variety of exotic urban types, and battles against a race of criminals
with unlikely nicknames. Strong on narrative, but weak on resolution, Sue’s
serial ends with Rodolphe giving up his crime-fighting career and returning
to his aristocratic role as the Grand Duke of Gerolstein. Sue’s tale became,
in the hands of G. W. M. Reynolds, the part-published, Mysteries of London
(first series, 1844–6), which was also hugely popular, and existed in mul-
tiple stage versions. (In the early twentieth century it takes to the screen as
the serial Les Mystères de New York.)
If France more than played its part in driving the international circula-
tion of narratives of the poor, the bohemian and the criminal, the role of
England cannot be underestimated. Where Egan’s Life in London was
preoccupied with the rakish adventures and ‘sprees’ of its genteel protag-
onists (Tom and Jerry) in the inter-class regions of Bohemian London, the
Newgate Novels that enjoyed enormous popular success in the 1830s and
1840s sought to show a layer below Bohemia, that of the career criminals
so dear to the middle-class imagination, their own low-life doubles. This
subgenre includes Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834) and Jack Shep-
pard (1839), and, more arguably, Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–9). All
of these were quickly adapted for the stage (by George Dibdin Pitt,
J. B. Buckstone and Charles Barnett, inter alia), which greatly extended
their cultural reach. The illustrations of George Cruikshank and his imi-
tators facilitated the process of stage adaptation by creating ready-made
mise-en-scènes. Indeed, it has been argued that authors and illustrators in
this period consciously worked to make sure that their novels would be
adapted for the stage. In this way the text, illustrations and stage adapta-
tions of such novels as Jack Sheppard became multimedia phenomena.8
Crime was made vivid enough in these novels and their spin-offs to
generate something of a moral panic, especially after the 1840 murder of
Lord William Russell by his valet, François Courvoisier, when it was
reported that Courvoisier had been inspired to homicide by Jack Sheppard.
Analogous moral panics have reappeared, of course, in relation to sub-
sequent representations of crime (or at least non-white-collar crime) in a
variety of other media.
36
Melodrama and sensation

The rich territory that urban crime narrative takes for itself is the city as a
place of vivid contrasts and unfathomable mysteries. Thus the London of
Reynolds’s Mysteries of London itself takes the form of a dramatic spectacle.
[C]ontrasts of a strange nature exist. The most unbounded wealth is the

neighbour of the most hideous poverty; the most gorgeous pomp is placed in
strong relief by the most deplorable squalor; the most seducing luxury is only
separated by a narrow wall from the most appalling misery. (pp. 2–3)
Here we see the novel deploy at the level of rhetoric a form of antithesis and
hyperbole that on stage lends itself to rapid and dramatic scene changes, and
later becomes cinematic montage. (Such contrasts would also have lent
themselves to other nineteenth-century visual ‘commodity-experiences’,
full-scale entertainments, such as the diorama, or the handheld Spooner’s
Transformations series of prints, both of which used lighting effects
to reveal dramatic changes of scene.) As Peter Brooks tells us in the
Melodramatic Imagination (1984), antithesis and hyperbole – including
the utilisation of stark opposites and sudden reversals of fortune – are the
characteristic tropes of melodrama, and we cannot go much further in our
exploration of the popular narratives of this period without some reckoning
with that much-abused term. It may be difficult to establish at this point if
the contrasts of the newly industrial cities generated melodrama as an
appropriate mimetic mode, or whether our vision of the Victorian city has
been so informed by the melodramatic imagination that we cannot see those
cities except as sites of contrast. Brooks argues that melodrama emerges not
so much in response to urbanisation as to modernity in a more political
sense, and that it evolved in post-revolutionary France as a dramatic lan-
guage through which modernity could be lived and rendered meaningful,
providing a weakly spiritual code for a post-sacred world, shorn of Church
and King. At the level of character, God and the devil might disappear, but
heroes – and perhaps more particularly heroines – and villains remain. By
mid-century, melodrama had become the dominant mode of popular fiction
and drama, and was attuned more to the aleatory and anonymous nature of
everyday urban life than to seismic changes at the level of the state. But it
functioned just as much as a mode of antithesis and hyperbole: in terms of
plot and action, seemingly minor decisions are charged with all the signifi-
cance of the conflict of good and evil; in terms of mise-en-scène, truth is
written on the face of things – heroines are fair; villains look villainous.
In fiction and drama alike, it is a mode of showing: emotions are close to the
surface, and frequently spill over in the form of tears; heroes evince their
37
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heroism by saving the vulnerable heroine, just in the nick of time. This is
also to say, of course, that suspense and spectacle are close to the heart of
melodrama. To this extent Romantic and Victorian melodrama looks for-
ward to the filmic ‘weepy’, but also to the action film.
In the 1860s, spectacle, suspense and melodrama converge under the sign
‘sensation’. Indeed, if melodrama is one keyword for any account of the
nineteenth-century commodity-experiences that furnish form and content
for later entertainment media, sensation is the other. The term seems to
appear first in the 1860s in relation to the stage, in such phrases as ‘sensa-
tion scene’ and ‘sensation drama’, but it appears at almost the same time in
relation to other up-to-the-moment cultural phenomena, from the novel, to
new music, to the trapeze and high-wire performances of Leotard and
Blondin. Some accounts suggest that sensation was a plant of American
growth, a ‘pois’nous exotic’, as Punch put it. In the theatres, it begins to
accrete first around Dion Boucicault’s smash-hit of 1860, The Colleen
Bawn. When Punch claimed that:
If a drama can boast of a run,

By dint of a strong situation,
The posters e’en now have begun
To puff the thing up as ‘Sensation’9
many readers would have recognised that drama as Boucicault’s play, which
ran for 230 nights at the Adelphi, and later at Drury Lane after Boucicault
and his wife, Agnes Robertson, who played the Colleen Bawn of the title,
had a falling out with the manager of the Adelphi. The Colleen was, on the
face of it, an unlikely candidate for the title of first great sensation drama, as
it is a costume drama rather than a tale of the modern city. Based on Gerald
Griffin’s tragic novel of 1829, The Collegians (itself inspired by a murder of
1819), it is a ‘mortgage melodrama’ set in eighteenth-century Ireland, in
which the plot hinges on the financial crisis of the once-wealthy Cregan
family, who have fallen into the clutches of the local moneylender.
A suitable marriage by the son of the house, Hardress, would save the
day, but he has been secretly married to Eily, the eponymous Colleen Bawn.
Such mortgage melodramas were common enough on the mid-Victorian
stage, Boucicault’s Octoroon being another well-known example.
The play worked hard to present a picturesque vision of pre-famine
Ireland, but colourful Irish peasants and impoverished gentry were not that
much a novelty on the London stage. What set the Colleen Bawn apart was
not its plot, but the ‘strong situation’, which occurs in scene 6 of Act 2, in
which Hardress’s boatman, the hunchbacked Danny Mann, attempts to
drown Eily in a water cave, Pool a Dhiol (from poll an dhiabhail, that is
38
‘the devil’s cave’ in Gaelic). As Eily is sinking beneath the surface, Myles-na-
Coppaleen, a local character and former admirer of hers, shoots her per-
secutor, swings across the cave onto a rock, like a trapeze-artist, dives into
the water, and saves her. It is a rapid-action sequence that was copied, and
often parodied, in countless reworkings of the same story: in burlesques like
the anonymous Oily Collins, H. J. Byron’s Miss Eily O’Connor, Martin
Dutnall’s The Coolean Bawn, and Andrew Halliday’s The Colleen Bawn,
Settled at Last; in the anonymous The Colleen Bawn: or The Collegian’s
Wife, and Cushla Ma Chree; and in a French adaptation, Le Lac du
Glenaston, by Adolphe D’Ennery. The Colleen even reached the heights of
opera, in Julius Benedict’s The Lily of Killarney (Covent Garden, 1862).
Other plays were devised, or altered, to include similar scenes in hopes of
securing some fraction of the popularity of Boucicault’s original (Edmund
Falconer’s Peep O’ Day is an obvious imitation, and became a consider-
able hit in its own right). The water-rescue was also translated into other
media, providing an arresting chromolithographic cover to popular illus-
trated sheet music – Colleen Bawn galops, quadrilles, polka mazurkas and
waltzes – which tend to either freeze the action at the moment just before or
just after Myles’s famous dive. As with the Newgate Novels, we are dealing
here with multimedia phenomena.
What was it about this scene that made it so powerful? Rescue scenes
were, after all, a staple of melodrama – Boucicault himself had used a
number of them, including the burning-building rescue of The Streets of
New York. But somehow the athleticism, and the split-second timing of the
scene (which depended on trapdoors to allow Eily and Myles to disappear
and reappear), together with the careful presentation of the moonlit water
cave (the appearance of moonlit water was achieved using gauze) seem to
have held audiences spellbound. There are aspects of the scene that are
particular to this play, not least that it turns grisly tragedy into comedy and
melodrama: the murder of the real Ellen Hanly on the Shannon in 1819 had
been reported in the London newspapers, and the Collegians had kept its
memory alive; in this respect the water cave, in which Myles distils illegal
spirits, is a sort of portal to the spirit world, or a memory chamber. But the
timing of the scene reminds us that for all its faux pastoralism, this is a piece
of industrial entertainment, one that brings the temporal patterns of the
factory floor into the theatre. That this was the case became all the clearer
when some years later Boucicault devised (and partly borrowed) another
famous rescue scene, that in After Dark (Princess’s Theatre, 1868), which
replaced the eerie setting of the water cave with a section of the London
underground. This time, the hero, Old Tom, a bit of a scapegrace like
Myles, must rescue his old army companion, Captain Chumley, not from
39
nicholas daly
drowning but from being crushed beneath the wheels of a train. While
Chumley lies unconscious on the tracks, we hear the train approaching
and see its lights pierce the gloom. Just in the nick of time Old Tom runs
from stage right, and plucks his old friend to safety as the train hurtles past.
Audiences were thrilled by this elaborate scene, which not only gave them a
last-second rescue, but also put the new underground railway, a smoky
piece of the modern metropolis, on stage before them. It is not difficult to
read the action as a sort of industrial allegory, or rather an anti-industrial
one, in which human beats machine on its own territory, an inorganic space
of bricks and steel tracks. But this is only part of the story, since the
audience that rejoices in the defeat of, or at least escape from, the machine,
is itself having its attention focused by an industrialised entertainment.
It can be argued that such scenes provide a sort of ‘temporal training’, in
the guise of leisure, for the members of an industrialising society: to enjoy
the scene the audience must imaginatively enter the time/space world of the
railway. But it also worth considering the extent to which such spectacles of
suspense are used to fix the attention of the crowd in a vice-like grip at a
time when two different but occasionally overlapping modern discourses
are emerging: a discourse of attention, concerned with the limits of human
attention in a machine age; and a discourse of the crowd, concerned by the
susceptibility of mass subjects to manipulation and control. We tend to
associate the latter discourse with the later nineteenth and early twentieth
century, and the appearance of such studies as Gustave Le Bon’s La
Psychologie des foules (1895), Gabriel Tarde’s L’Opinion et la foule
(1901), and Gerald Stanley Lee’s Crowds: A Moving Picture of Democracy
(1913). (Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management
(1911) might be thought to belong to the discourse of the crowd and the
discourse of attention.)10 However, there was also a mid nineteenth-century
discourse of the crowd, that might be taken to encompass works as different
as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Man of the Crowd’ (1840), Charles Baudelaire’s Les
Fleurs du mal (1857) and Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1868).
In the 1860s, the discourse of the crowd was given focus by the push for
political reform that eventually led to the 1867 Reform Act. The discourse
of attention, as described by Jonathan Crary, was also related to fears and
anxieties about the subjects of an industrial and urban society, but was more
physiological in its interests. The ‘sensation scene’ when it arrives, then, in
the 1860s, clearly derives from the history of melodrama as a form of drama
with strong visual impact, but it is also a cultural form that is rooted in the
off-stage history of modernity, and the attempt by writers and artists to
place themselves in an age of crowds: while some writers sought to evade
the crowd by pitching their wares at a small, elite audience (the line that
40
goes from the aesthetic movement to high modernism), others sought to

hold the crowd in thrall, to hit them right between the eyes.
It is not easy, of course, to know to what extent the latter group suc-
ceeded. Certainly, contemporary commentary on the vogue of sensation
attributes to it either a numbing or a dangerously exciting force. The
audience for mid-Victorian melodrama was an active, heterogeneous and
talkative one by later standards, and its attention was not exclusively
focused on the stage – house lights, for example, were not fully dimmed
during performance until later in the century, and the gentrification of the
West End theatres through the removal of the pit was also a later develop-
ment. Nonetheless, it is easy to see how debates over the deleterious effects
of sensation anticipate twentieth-century controversies around the perni-
cious effects of cinema, television and other visual entertainment platforms,
which have also been seen as having either a numbing or over-exciting effect
on putatively passive audiences. The consistency in such accounts across the
historical range suggests that it is the mass audience shaped by modernity
rather than the various entertainment apparatuses that is the real target.
From it stage origins, ‘sensation’ soon came to be more closely associated
with the novel. The ‘sensation novels’ of the 1860s carried over the fascination
with crime of the pre- and early-Victorian Newgate Novel, but transposed it
upwards in the social register, and gave it a contemporary setting: murder and
theft feature, but so, too, do bigamy, adultery and illegitimacy among the
middle and upper classes. It can be argued that the sensation novels are actually
quite a diverse group of narratives, lumped together by contemporary critics
with more of an eye to their supposedly dubious moral effects rather than
aesthetic qualities. But in a handful of the most popular novels, beginning
with Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White (1859–60) and M. E. Braddon’s Lady
Audley’s Secret (1862), we do see some new narrative features: not so much the
foregrounding of spectacle and suspense, though there are certainly the verbal
equivalent of ‘sensation scenes’ in these novels, as the absolute centrality of
mystery, or what Roland Barthes called the ‘hermeneutic code’. Collins’s earlier
novel, Basil (1859), for example, is very much a sensational novel of modern
life, but it lacks the element of mystery that made The Woman in White
addictive to its first readers. In the latter novel the initial mystery – who is the
mysterious woman in white who accosts Walter Hartright on his moonlit walk
from Hampstead to London? – is replaced by another: what is the Secret she
mentions, and which Sir Percival Glyde is so anxious to conceal? In his sub-
sequent hit, The Moonstone (1868), Collins devises the first country-house
mystery, with a small cast of characters, one of whom has stolen the gem which
gives the novel its title, a large diamond stolen from the treasury of Tippu Sultan
during the 1799 sack of Seringapatam (that is, Srirangapatna). In both novels
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nicholas daly
one of the characters must turn detective: Walter does so to restore the name
and fortune of his beloved, Laura; in The Moonstone the finger of guilt seems to
point to Franklin Blake, who must find the real thief to clear his name. These are
not, of course, the first mystery narratives in English, and descend from, among
other sources, the Gothic novel, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), and
Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin detective stories; they also owe something to the earlier
Mysteries serials of the 1840s and 1850s, though there is very little ‘low’ urban
life here. And, of course, Collins is drawing on the recent appearance of the
actual detective police, created to deal with urban crime.
We have, perhaps, become so used to narratives that foreground the
hermeneutic code that it is necessary to remember that to the readers of
the 1860s these were something novel. Indeed, to some critics, the conceal-
ment of some narrative information for hundreds of pages in order to reveal
it later seemed like rather a shabby trick. Punch in 1863 particularly made
fun of the Secret of the Woman in White and its imitators by creating its
own serialised sensation novel, F. C. Burnand’s Mokeanna, or The White
Witness, illustrated by the young George Du Maurier, which features a
plethora of Secrets: Lady Bettina reveals to her daughters that she has been
married before to a man of low station, Barlow, who also seems to have
killed her brother, for which he is executed (brother and Barlow both show
up later); her husband, Sir Lionel, has for his part confessed that he was still
married to someone else when he married her; the children reveal to Lady
Bettina that they are not really her daughters; Mokeanna, a horse/donkey,
finds a Secret Truss of hay, and so on (‘moke’ being archaic slang for a
donkey, as well as a dialect word for mist or fog).
Punch also aimed its barbs at two other aspects of sensation culture: its
tendency to re-mediation, and its litigiousness. In Mokeanna the writer
assures us that he has protected his intellectual property by:
having caused several versions of the same [story] to be made for Farces,
Burlesques, Melodramas, and Operas respectively. A reduction on taking a
quantity. Managers treated with liberally. No Irish need apply. He has also
lately entered himself personally at Stationers’ Hall. ‘Mokeanna’, besides
having been translated into all the modern European and most of the Semitic
languages for future publication, forms the subject of a New Pantomime, in
which the Author has lately invented and registered all the Comic Scenes.
Parties attended.11
We have already seen how readily certain narratives migrated across generic
boundaries, but it is also worth noting how this amphibiousness also meant
a greater scope for extracting profits from literary and dramatic properties,
and this tended towards greater vigilance about infringements of copyright.
42
The ‘no Irish need apply’ is presumably a gibe at Boucicault in particular,

but Boucicault is not the only target of this passage. In part, perhaps,
because the success of a ‘sensation’ often depended on some striking scene
or special effect rather than the work as a whole, authors had become
increasingly jealous of any attempt by others to reproduce these selling
points, and both Collins and Boucicault took to the courts to defend their
imaginative property.
As with the Newgate Novels, the most successful sensation novels were
quickly reworked for the stage; in some cases, as with M. E. Braddon’s Lady
Audley’s Secret and Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861), the stage ver-
sions coming to be as popular as, or more popular than, the novels. Inspired
by the runaway success of The Woman in White, and playing with similar
narrative surprises (the reappearance of the supposedly dead George
Talboys echoes the sensational reappearance of the supposedly dead Laura
Glyde, née Fairlie), Braddon’s novel originally appeared as a serial in Robin
Goodfellow, and, after that periodical folded, was continued in the Six-
penny Magazine, then being issued as a three-volume novel before the serial
finished. (This complex path to publication is a useful reminder that one of
the things sensation novels did was provide content for the mid-market
magazines that were enjoying something of a boom in the 1860s.)
A former actress, Braddon wrote narrative fiction that was informed by
the pacing and visual appeal of the stage, so it was not surprising that Lady
Audley’s Secret was soon adapted by a number of other authors for the
theatre, among the most successful being versions by George Roberts (that
is, Robert Walters) and William E. Suter. In Suter’s version, Lady Audley’s
Secret! (first performed at the Queen’s Theatre, 21 February 1863),
although the basic plot is largely followed, comic relief is provided by the
Butler and Footman, Bibbles and Bubbles; sensation scenes are provided by
the scene in which Lady Audley pushes her first husband down a well
(having stabbed him first for good measure, detail absent from the novel),
and by the fire at the inn; a third highlight is provided by the final scene, in
which Lady Audley dies, having poisoned herself rather than face incarcer-
ation in an asylum for the insane (another of Suter’s changes).
East Lynne is the most successful of all the sensation novels in terms of
the longevity of its spin-offs. Lacking the mystery element favoured by
Collins and Braddon, it relies instead on a form of slow-burning suspense
and strong emotional appeal, and tells the story of an aristocratic woman,
Lady Isabel Vane, who is seduced away from her middle-class husband, only
to be disfigured in the train crash in which her lover perishes; presumed
dead, she returns in disguise to look after her own children in the home of
her now remarried husband; there she witnesses the fatal illness of one of
43
nicholas daly
her children, and eventually dies herself. It is a novel of two halves, as it

were: Isabel sins, and spends a long time being punished for it. Long after its
initial appearance in 1861, versions of the novel continued to appear on the
provincial stage, and there were at least ten film versions from the silent
period alone, the first in 1902. (There were four of Lady Audley’s Secret in
the same period – Theda Bara, the great silent-screen vamp, played both
Isabel Vane (1916) and Helen Talboys/Lady Audley (1915)).
Early cinema drew directly on well-known titles from the literary and
dramatic repertoire of the sensation era: besides Lady Audley and East
Lynne there were versions of, for example, Boucicault’s Colleen Bawn
(three separate versions in 1911), Octoroon (1913), Streets of New York
(1913) and After Dark (1915), and of Collins’s Woman in White (1912) and
Moonstone (1914, 1915). But early screen practice was also deeply
informed by melodrama more generally. There have been various attempts
to trace the connections between melodrama and early cinema, one of the
earliest of which is A. Nicholas Vardac’s Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method
from Garrick to Griffith (1949). More recently, Ben Singer has provided a
detailed and persuasive narrative of the way in which nineteenth-century
melodrama fed into early cinema through such action-driven serials as What
Happened to Mary (1912), with Mary Fuller, the 1913 Adventures of
Kathlyn (the first to feature ‘hold-over’ suspense at the end of each episode),
The Hazards of Helen (1914–17), featuring Helen Holmes and later
Helen Gibson, the Perils of Pauline (1914), featuring Pearl White, and the
Mysteries of Myra (1916), with Jean Sothern.12 In these serials, or chapter
plays, such sensation scenes as the ‘railway rescue’ were used to create recur-
ring cliff-hanging suspense, and the serial format allowed for this suspense to
be held over to the next instalment, as it had with the nineteenth-century novel.
But where the ‘virtue in distress’ formula of much nineteenth-century melo-
drama, in drama and fiction alike, tended to centre on vulnerable and rather
passive heroines, the heroines of the early serials were often active and
resourceful.13 For Singer, the persecuted yet resilient and resourceful heroines
of these serials refract in complex ways social ambivalence regarding the
changes in the status of women in this period. In this way, early cinema, like
Victorian popular fiction and drama, used spectacle, suspense and mystery to
present a popular reflection on the effects of modernisation.
Spectacle
I want to conclude by discussing a mode that, while it overlaps with
melodrama, is not contained by it, and that also provides an important link
between nineteenth-century popular culture and what follows: spectacle,
44
which, like melodrama, provided a way of mediating historical change, and

featured in a variety of cultural forms. In particular, I want to consider here
the imagination of disaster as an important strain within popular modes of
modernity. Where melodrama seems to offer a way of living through mod-
ernity, or even, in the form of sensation fiction and drama, temporal
training for it, spectacle seems to return to a more popular Romantic, or
dark sublime vision of the annihilation of the self in the face of a modern-
isation that is quite literally imagined as a cataclysm.
One of the most powerful strands of the imagination of modernity-
as-disaster projects the modern into the remote past, and the destructive
power of modernity onto the natural world. Volcanic eruptions enjoyed
particular popularity. As Kevin Salatino has shown, powerful families
mounted firework-spectaculars in the Renaissance period to display their
own might.14 But as part of a modern diet of commercial entertainment they
come into their own in the eighteenth century, in the wake of the rediscovery
of the ruins of Pompeii in 1748. Entertainments of this sort were enor-
mously popular from the 1770s through to the middle of the nineteenth
century, and seem to have first appeared in the Georgian pleasure gardens
rather than on stage or in the novel. Richard Altick traces them to the
Marylebone Gardens, which featured fireworks and cascades of fire from the
1770s, and by 1772 offered ‘The Forge of Vulcan’, in which a ‘mountain . . .
appeared in eruption, with lava rushing down the precipices’. Ranelagh
Gardens followed suit, in a purpose-built auditorium. Audiences watched
the Cyclops forge the armour of Mars while listening to suitably dramatic
music by Gluck, Haydn, Giardini and Handel. At the climax, Mount Etna
spewed out smoke and flames before lava came pouring down its sides. As
Altick puts it, ‘these eruptions were destined to reverberate throughout the
London scene, indoor as well as outdoor, for the next half-century and
beyond’.15 (In this, their only rivals, Altick suggests, were storm scenes.)
Such scenes also animated the high art of the period, for example Joseph
Wright of Derby’s Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the
Bay of Naples (c. 1776–80). Volcano scenes received a boost in the early
1800s, when the excavation of Pompeii fostered considerable interest in the
historical disaster that had destroyed that town. This apocalyptic topos was
treated in high Romantic style by John Martin in The Destruction of
Pompeii and Herculaneum (1821), which was turned into a diorama at
the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1822. London audiences could see Pacini’s
opera, L’ultimo giorno di Pompeii in 1831, and by 1835 they could see
at least three rival Vesuvian spectacles, including a fireworks spectacular at
Vauxhall Gardens, as well as representations of the eruptions of Mounts
Etna and Hecla.16 Such spectacular scenes eventually found their way into
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fiction. In 1834, the prolific Edward Bulwer Lytton produced one of

the century’s most popular novels, the Last Days of Pompeii, which uses
the eruption to embellish a melodramatic tale of ancient Roman life and the
clash of rival faiths. In the novel’s most famous scene, the hero Glaucus
faces death in the amphitheatre for the murder of Apaecides, brother of his
beloved Ione. But the hungry lion he must fight decides to retire to his cage
when he senses that something is wrong, and a witness appears who clears
Glaucus and reveals Arbaces as the true murderer. As the fickle crowd turns
upon Arbaces, the Egyptian sorcerer who also loves Ione, the volcano
dramatically intervenes:
At that moment they felt the earth shake beneath their feet; the walls of the
theatre trembled: and, beyond in the distance, they heard the crash of falling
roofs; an instant more and the mountain-cloud seemed to roll towards them,
dark and rapid, like a torrent; at the same time, it cast forth from its bosom a
shower of ashes mixed with vast fragments of burning stone! Over the crush-
ing vines – over the desolate streets – over the amphitheatre itself – far and
wide – with many a mighty splash in the agitated sea – fell that awful shower! . . .
Each turned to fly – each dashing, pressing, crushing, against the other.
Trampling recklessly over the fallen – amidst groans, and oaths, and prayers,
and sudden shrieks, the enormous crowd vomited itself forth through the
numerous passages. (vol. iii, ch. 4)
Bulwer Lytton’s novel was quickly and successfully adapted for the theatre, in
such versions as J. B. Buckstone’s The Last Days of Pompeii; or, Seventeen
Hundred Years Ago, which ran at the Adelphi for sixty-four nights in 1834.
The Times claimed that ‘the eruption of Vesuvius in the last scene conveyed to
the spectator a good idea of the terrors of that awful, natural phenomenon’.17
Other adaptations followed, including Louisa H. Medina’s The Last Days of
Pompeii: A Dramatic Spectacle, Taken from Bulwer’s Celebrated Novel
of the Same Name (1858), which appears to follow Buckstone word for
word, and the novel and its stage avatars remained popular throughout the
rest of the century.
With the coming of the cinematograph, the volcanic spectacular was
given a new lease of life. Before the reign of Hollywood, one of the most
influential of the Italian ‘super-films’ (the multi-reel narrative feature films
that would displace short features to become the mainstay of the film
industry) was Cabiria (1914), a historical drama of the third century bce,
with intertitles by poet, novelist and ardent nationalist, Gabriele
D’Annunzio. This ‘Historical Vision’, set against the backdrop of the
Second Punic War, opens with an earthquake, the dramatic eruption of
Mount Etna in Sicily, and the destruction of the town of Catana. Cabiria,
46
the daughter of a rich Roman landowner, is lost in the confusion, and with
her nurse, Croessa, begins a long series of adventures that takes her from
Sicily to Carthage, to Cirta, capital of Numidia (part of modern Algeria),
and finally to Rome. (Cabiria, in turn, inspired the Babylonian sequences in
D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), which was billed as ‘A Colossal
Spectacle’.) The adventures of a vulnerable orphan, including last-minute
rescues, would have been familiar to Victorian readers and theatre-goers, as
we have seen, but so, too, would have been the representation of natural
disaster as entertainment, in the form of the vividly realised earthquake and
volcanic eruption that launch Cabiria on her dramatic course. Bulwer
Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii also received more direct homage from
film-makers: between 1900 and 1950 at least nine films appeared under
that title, or under the Italian title Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii.18 None of
these was, perhaps, very faithful to the original story, though some names
and plot details recur, and the volcano always puts in an appearance. (The
1935 version, for example, produced by Merian C. Cooper, fresh from the
success of King Kong, changes the storyline completely, though gladiators,
emergent Christianity, and Vesuvius all feature.)
From their pleasure-garden origins, cataclysmic scenes have enjoyed con-
siderable longevity, aided by their ability to mutate to accommodate new
political content. Cabiria is a celebration of the glory days of Rome, written
by an ardent Italian nationalist, but through its disaster scenes it registers
the impact of the second industrial revolution and the approaching world
war. As the century unfolded, a more capacious subgenre emerges, the
special-effects-driven disaster film, which utilises a variety of forces to effect
the annihilation of a carefully realised world. Where Bulwer Lytton uses the
distant past, film-makers have more often used distant or near-future scen-
arios to refract a variety of subsequent threats, from atomic-age annihil-
ation during the Cold War (The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, 2008); The
War of the Worlds (1953, 2005)), to ecological catastrophe (The Day after
Tomorrow (2004)), though natural disasters, including volcanoes, have also
found favour (Deluge (1933), Earthquake (1974), Krakatoa: East of Java
(1969), Volcano (1997)). While a recurring feature of such narratives is the
focus on the society that emerges from the ruins, destruction itself remains a
major component of their appeal.
A chapter such as this can provide only a partial account of the web of
connections among popular modes in the nineteenth century, and their
subsequent remediation. I have focused here on some strands of this web –
tales of the city, melodrama, sensation and spectacle – at the expense of others
that were equally significant: burlesque, slapstick and other comic modes:
minstrelsy, and empire narratives, to name only a few. It would also be
47
nicholas daly
possible to trace the way in which individual careers (e.g. those of William Le
Queux, Elinor Glyn) straddle the late Victorian literary world and that of the
cinema. Moreover, an account such as this foregrounds text (or play, or film)
at the expense of performance. Victorian music hall and, in the US, vaude-
ville, provided alternative, working-class-dominated public spheres in which
evolved routines, characters and physical styles that migrated to Hollywood
through the careers of such figures as Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and
Buster Keaton. But I hope that even an account as partial as this suggests the
high levels of continuity between nineteenth-century popular culture and
that of the early twentieth century, while also signalling some of the breaks.
NOTES
1 Taylor’s play is in fact a French adaptation from Brisebarre and Nus’s Le Retour
de Melun (1863). The prolific Williams also adapted numerous French novels
and plays, and wrote popular biographies of Buffalo Bill, P. T. Barnum and
others.
2 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000).
3 On Anglo-American publishing relations in these years, see Meredith L. McGill,
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadephia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) and Claire Parfait, The Publishing
History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852–2002 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007).
4 See Gregory Dart, ‘“Flash Style”: Pierce Egan and Literary London, 1820–28’,
History Workshop Journal 51 (2001): 180–205. See also Kate Newey, ‘Attic
Windows and Street Scenes: Victorian Images of the City on Stage’, Victorian
Literature and Culture 25 (1997): 253–62 on city plays.
5 ‘Amusements’, New York Times, 1 July 1873.
6 Richard Maxwell, The Mysteries of Paris and London (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 1992).
7 Eugène Sue, Les Mystères de Paris (New York: Presse du ‘New World’, 1844),
vol. i, ch. 1, p. 5.
8 See Matthew Buckley, ‘Sensations of Celebrity: “Jack Sheppard” and the Mass
Audience’, Victorian Studies 44:3 (Spring 2002): 423–63. For the classic account
of the interplay of fiction and its visual recreation, see Martin Meisel, Realiza-
tions: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England
(Princeton University Press, 1983).
9 Punch 41, 20 July 1861, p. 31.
10 On Lee, see Gregory W. Bush, Lord of Attention: Gerald Stanley Lee and the
Crowd Metaphor in Industrializing America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1991). For the crowd in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, see John
Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000).
11 F. C. Burnand, Mokeanna, A Treble Temptation, etc. (London, 1873), pp. 1–2.
12 For a more complete list, see Kalton C. Lahue, Bound and Gagged: The Story of
the Silent Serials (South Brunswick and New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968).
48
13 There are, of course, plenty of exceptions to this pattern in the sensation novel,
including active heroines like Marian Halcombe and Magdalen Vanstone (in
Collins’s No Name (1862)), and active villains like Lady Audley. On stage,
the first ‘railway rescue’ hit, Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1867), features
the heroine rescuing a man from an oncoming train.
14 Kevin Salatino, Incendiary Art: The Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern
Europe (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1997), pp. 54–6.
15 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard
University Press, 1978), p. 96.
16 See Peter Sheppard Skaerved, with Janet Snowman and Frances Palmer, John
Orlando Parry: The Poster Man, A Snapshot of London’s Musical Life in 1835
(London: Royal Academy of Music, 2007), p. 22.
17 See the overview of the 1834 season at the Adelphi Theatre Project, www.emich.
edu/public/english/adelphi_calendar/hst1834.htm, accessed on 15 May 2009.
18 One of these, the 1913 version, is in fact a pirated version of the 1908 film, with
additional footage borrowed from Giovanni Pastrone’s 1911 film, La caduta di
Troia (The Fall of Troy). See the BFI Film and Television Database, http://ftvdb.
bfi.org.uk/sift/title/260780, accessed 16 May 2009.
49
3
JOHN CAUGHIE
Television and serial fictions
Written in 1974, Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural

Form was to become for many academics, and particularly for academics
who approached popular culture from the perspective of the humanities,
one of the foundational texts of the study of television, the first and even the
only book on reading lists, the book which introduced the concept of ‘flow’
as a way of identifying ‘the defining characteristic of broadcasting’.1 While,
almost forty years later, many of its formulations have worn thin with over-
use, Williams’s observation on the centrality of televisual dramatic fiction to
modern experience still has the force of defamiliarisation: it is still surpris-
ing to consider, as if for the first time, how much of our time is spent with,
how many of our references are drawn from, or how much the structure of
contemporary feeling is shaped by television dramatic fiction in its various
forms. ‘It seems probable’, says Williams,
that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a
week or a weekend, by the majority of viewers, than would have been watched
in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. It is not
uncommon for the majority of viewers to see, regularly, as much as two or three
hours of drama, of various kinds, every day. The implications of this have
scarcely begun to be considered. It is clearly one of the unique characteristics
of advanced industrial societies that drama as an experience is now an intrinsic
part of everyday life, at a quantitative level which is so very much greater than
any precedent as to see a fundamental qualitative change. Whatever the social
and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simu-
lation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern
cultural pattern. Or, to put it categorically, most people spend more time
watching various kinds of drama than in preparing and eating food.2
Written by a Cambridge Professor of Drama on a Visiting Professorship at

Stanford University, Television: Technology and Cultural Form is informed
by Williams’s first encounter with American television. At a time when
British television was still shaped by the principles of public service,
50
American television in 1974, increasingly shaped by commercial principles,

represented a possible future. Read in 2010, Williams’s conclusion is poign-
ant. On the one hand, there is the possibility of the technology of television
as an almost utopian force, one of the contemporary tools ‘of the long
revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy, and of the
recovery of effective communication in complex urban and industrial soci-
eties’.3 On the other hand, such technologies
are also the tools of what would be, in context, a short and successful counter-
revolution, in which, under the cover of talk about choice and competition, a
few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies,
could reach further into our lives, at every level from news to psycho-drama,
until individual and collective response to many different kinds of experience
and problem became almost limited to choice between their programmed
possibilities.4
Written twelve years before Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation moved
into television in the United States, and fifteen years before he launched Sky
Television in the United Kingdom, there is an uncanny prescience in
Williams’s worst fears.
Characteristically, Williams is engaged not simply by the number of
hours that ‘dramatic simulation’ occupies in contemporary life, but by
the qualitative change that this may make in the modern structure of
experience. For Williams, the shift from a regulated public service of
three channels to a deregulated and commercial future was not just
about the structures of the industry but about the structures of feeling
which new forms of drama brought into being and naturalised. Flashing
forward to the twenty-first century, we discover not simply a proliferation
but also a massive extension of dramatic simulation, accompanied by
an erosion of the boundary between drama and actuality: the performance
of the self as celebrity in reality television or the structure of the breaking
story in twenty-four-hour news, in both of which lives, identities and
events are shaped according to the same principles as simulated dramatic
narrative. Even more than Williams could have anticipated, popular fic-
tion has leaked out from between the covers of books, the instalments of
magazines, or the darkness of cinemas. It is no longer a ‘specialised
activity’, but has become a central, shaping component of the experience
of everyday life.5
The forms of drama which Williams identifies as central to television are
the serial, ‘a dramatic action divided into episodes’, and the series, in which
‘the continuity is not of an action but of one or more characters’.6 While his
intellectual and political sympathies may lie with the single play which in
51
john caughie
1974 was still at the cutting edge of British culture, he nevertheless recog-
nised that ‘few forms of television have the potential importance of the
original serial’.7 Both serials and series have precedents – in cinema, radio,
the comic strip and the novel – but television has given them new promin-
ence, the ‘long-form’ narrative becoming the classic form of television
dramatic fiction, representing a new and distinct chronotope in the long
history of novelistic narrative.8 In his writing in the 1920s and 1930s, the
decades before television, Béla Balázs argued that ‘the birth of film art led
not only to the creation of new works of art but to the emergence of new
human faculties with which to perceive and understand this new art’.9 Like
the film invented at the end of the nineteenth century, television is a cultural
form born ‘in the epoch of capitalism’,10 but much more than film its
particular force comes from its availability as a part of everyday life,
structured within, and structuring, everyday domestic routines. It is this
availability that raises questions of subjectivity and ‘human faculties’, and
gives television and its serial dramatic simulations a particular importance
in considering contemporary popular fiction.
Just as the development of the serialised novel of the nineteenth century
has to be understood in relation to the commercial interests of the publish-
ing industry rather than by the creative aspirations of writers, so the
development of the serial/series form of television drama has to be placed
in the context of the history of broadcasting. In the postwar period in
Britain, and particularly in the period after the Report of the Committee
of Broadcasting – the ‘Pilkington Committee Report’ – of 196211 and the
introduction of BBC2 in 1964, television drama in the form of the single
play was a central component of British culture, extending the impulse of
the theatrical, literary and cinematic New Waves of the 1950s and the spirit
of engagement which they fostered. While we may be sceptical of ‘Golden
Ages’, television drama in the 1960s and 1970s was as important to the
culture as theatre, literature or art, and probably rather more important
than British cinema. From its beginnings in ABC’s ‘Armchair Theatre’ in the
late 1950s and early 1960s, to its peak in the BBC’s ‘The Wednesday Play’
and ‘Play for Today’ in the 1960s and 1970s, the work of Alun Owen,
Dennis Potter, David Mercer, Jim Allen, David Hare, John Hopkins, Troy
Kennedy Martin, John McGrath, Irene Shubik, Ken Loach and Tony
Garnett (gender is inescapable) bridged the gap between popular television
and ‘serious drama’. Much of the drama was forgettable and is forgotten,
but plays like Potter’s Stand Up, Nigel Barton (BBC, 1965), or Mercer’s And
Did Those Feet (BBC, 1965), or Peter Watkins’s The War Game (BBC, 1965),
or John Hopkins’s Talking to a Stranger (BBC, 1967), or Ingmar Bergman’s
The Lie (BBC, 1970), or the Loach/Garnett production of Nell Dunn’s
52
Up the Junction (BBC, 1965), or, perhaps most famously of all, their
collaboration with Jeremy Sandford on Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966) –
all of these and many more became national events, embedded in the
national culture as powerfully as the work of the poets, novelists and
playwrights celebrated by literary culture.
It is worth pausing to consider the place of these single plays in the
context of a discussion of popular fiction. In the late 1950s, ITV’s ‘Armchair
Theatre’, transmitted live on Sunday evenings, attracted an average
audience of 12 million, and even in the 1970s a ‘Play for Today’ on BBC2
could, on occasion, reach an audience of 10 million. With all the caveats
surrounding the calculation of ratings and what constitutes ‘viewing’, this
means that, in the days before time-shifting and multi-channels, around one-
fifth of the British population might all be watching the same television
drama at the same time; and watching, perhaps, plays written by Harold
Pinter or Doris Lessing or Samuel Beckett or Ingmar Bergman. In 1959, a
BBC ‘World Theatre’ production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector
had an audience of 9.5 million, and for its drama slot in the first week
of its operation in 1955, ITV, commercial television, chose a production of
Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. In such a context, are the plays of
Pinter, Gogol or Turgenev ‘popular’? In what ways and with what effects
might they be assimilated into popular fiction? While numbers may not
define ‘popularity’, nevertheless television inhabits the category of the
popular in ways that unsettle easy distinctions.
The status of ‘serious drama’ on a popular medium in the period up to
the 1980s was a condition of public service broadcasting, and was, of
course, determined by the limited availability of choice in viewing. The
decision to transmit Gogol or Pinter as ‘popular television’ speaks to the
desire of television for prestige and to an explicit mission to ‘improve’
popular taste, and the audience figures may say as much about the absence
of choice as about discrimination. In the terms which became fashionable in
the 1980s, within the ‘full broadcasting market’ anticipated by the Peacock
Report in 1986 in which the consumer was ‘sovereign’, choosing when to
watch as well as what to watch, it became more difficult for television to
sustain a public service which was defined by what the Reithian institution
deemed to be good for the public, and the cultural forms of television came
more and more to be shaped by demand rather than led by supply.12
The most visible sign of transition on the way to this new age in British
television was the arrival of Channel 4 in 1982. In dramatic fiction, Channel 4
completed the long march of technology from live television, showing
actuality and fiction as they happened on the street or in the studio, to film,
a record of what had happened, with all the possibilities of shaping, editing
53
john caughie
and structuring. Increasingly, in television drama, film was not only a

recording technology, but also an aesthetic. Television drama increasingly
aspired to look like cinematic film, and Channel 4 began a new alignment
between cinema and television. Film on Four supplanted the Wednesday Play
or Play for Today, and began the process of establishing new standards and
new production practices, redefining the expectations of how television
drama would look and how it would engage the viewer: reshaping television
drama as ‘made-for-television movies’. The structural transition in broad-
casting which Channel 4 marked in the UK in the 1980s was the transition
between an ‘era of scarcity’, in which broadcasting was available only
through three terrestrial channels, and an ‘era of plenty’,13 in which
channels, their sources of production and their means of distribution,
proliferate. The brief flowering of Channel 4 as an ‘alternative’, even
‘oppositional’, channel, enjoined by its statute to ‘appeal to tastes and
interests not generally catered for by ITV’ and ‘to encourage innovation
and experiment in the form and content of programmes’, initiated a
transitional ‘era of availability’. It is interesting and instructive to recall
in 2010, from the perspective of an era of plenty, this distant era of
only twenty-five or fifty years ago when television seemed full of creative
possibilities and when television, by Act of Parliament, had a responsi-
bility to be innovative, diverse and even radical. Television history, or at
least the history of television drama, seems condemned to be elegiac.
In the context of popular fiction, in the 1980s the single play migrates to
cinema, or at least, to the cinematic, and it is the serial which moves into the
heartland of television drama, defining our expectations of what television
drama is. If one conjures up a list of titles from the 1980s and 1990s to
compare with the list above from The Wednesday Play and Play for Today,
it will include dramas like Brideshead Revisited (Granada, 1981), Smiley’s
People (BBC, 1982), Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC, 1982), The Jewel in
the Crown (Granada, 1984), The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (BBC,
1986), The Singing Detective (BBC, 1986), Tutti Frutti (BBC, 1987), Oranges
Are Not the Only Fruit (BBC, 1990), GBH (BBC, 1991), Our Friends from
the North (BBC, 1997); and that is before we consider such ‘classic serials’ as
Vanity Fair (BBC, 1987), Middlemarch (BBC, 1994), Martin Chuzzlewit
(BBC, 1994), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (BBC, 1996), Bleak House (BBC,
2005); crime series like Prime Suspect (Granada, 1991–2003, and, finally,
2006) or Cracker (Granada, 1993–5, 1996 and, finally, 2006), or spy/security
series like Spooks (Kudos for BBC, 2006–). Building on the acknowledged
attractions of British and American soap operas and crime series, the
1980s was the period in which serials and series, both adaptations and
original dramas, came to establish themselves as the core of television’s
54
narrative form. The serial and the series, rather than the single play,
became the classical form of television dramatic narrative.
Historically, what is at stake in this is a final separation of television
drama from the theatrical model from which it had grown in the days of live
television drama. From the 1980s, one path leads away from a theatrical
aesthetic to a cinematic aesthetic in the form of Film on Four; the other path
leads towards an aesthetic which popular television had already claimed as
its own: the form of soap opera and sitcom, the form of the serial and the
series. The narrative fictions of these televisual forms owed less to the
theatre and more to the novel, and, in particular, to the multi-character,
multi-plot, temporally extended, interrupted narratives of the nineteenth-
century serialised novel.
The increasing dominance of the serial/series form can be explained on a
business model. The one-off play has a high unit cost and is difficult to
market on the overseas market. Even the play series like The Wednesday
Play and Play for Today, uneven in quality, did not command the viewer
loyalty which the competition for audiences required in an era of increasing
availability and choice. The serial, on the other hand, benefits from econ-
omies of scale which produce a lower cost per hour, commands audience
loyalty during its run, and is more attractive internationally, particularly in
the US where Cable and Public Service Broadcasting in the 1980s had low
production resources of their own. UK drama was well placed to satisfy the
international appetite for ‘quality’. Presales, co-production and sponsorship
across the Atlantic, and to a lesser extent with Australia, permit a level of
investment in production values which could not be supported by BBC or
ITV budgets alone, and this investment (both in visual style and ‘talent’)
shows on the screen in a way which secures not just audiences, but respect,
enabling the BBC, in particular, to demonstrate that it is honouring its
public service obligations. The serial, rather than the original, awkward
and only occasionally astonishing single play, becomes the marker for ‘that
strange quality known as “quality”’.14
While cost-per-hour and the demands of the international market, how-
ever, may go some way towards explaining the attraction of series and
serials for broadcasters and producers, the serialisation of drama seems also
to follow the logic of the everyday consumption of television, tuned to its
place within the routines of everyday life rather than within the ‘specialised
time’ of the cinema or the theatre. The centrality of serialisation is adapted
to one of the defining characteristics of television as a domestic technology:
its interruptability and the possibility of distraction. Though it may often
get the undivided attention of its audience, television cannot assume it. It
still has to work on the assumption that it is open to distraction: externally,
55
john caughie
by the interruption by other routines of domestic life, or, internally, by the

intrusion of commercial breaks. Just as Virginia Woolf distinguishes the
‘long drawn continuities’ of the novel from the compressed time of the play
in the theatre,15 so it is possible to distinguish the time of television from the
time and space of cinema which is organised to ensure unbroken attention
and absorption.
This possibility of interruption draws television’s narrative form towards
an organisation around segments rather than towards the sequence of causality
in which each unit is only meaningful when it leads to a narrative effect and
in which missing a causal link – through inattention or interruption – can
be fatal to the coherence of the narrative. As John Ellis argued in 1982, the
characteristic point of engagement in segmented narratives is not the narrative
goal which exists only to be closed when the mission is accomplished, but
the ‘dilemma’ which may be re-opened week after week.16 Serial narrative,
whether it be soap opera or thriller, trains its viewers to retain narrative
links over extended periods of time, using the modes of understanding of
multiple implication and dilemma which are the commonplace of daily life
rather than the specialised form of deductive understanding demanded by
the uninterrupted sequential causality of the ‘goal-oriented’ narratives of
classical cinema.
The locus classicus of the ‘long drawn continuities’ of television narrative
serialisation is in the continuous serial, best represented on British television
by the longest drawn continuity of all: Coronation Street (Granada for ITV,
1960–). Coronation Street is an essential point of reference in considering
popular fiction on television, and it is frequently in critical writing on the
soap opera, particularly by feminist writers, that the importance of the
relationship between the everyday regularity of television and the everyday
time of domestic life is most sharply drawn. In her essay on the continuous
serial in the groundbreaking collective BFI monograph on Coronation Street
published in 1981, Christine Geraghty draws particular attention to the
ways in which serials negotiate the passing of time, populating the interval
between episodes or between plots with what she calls, drawing on Carl
Grabo, ‘an unrecorded existence’.17 ‘The characters in a serial’, she says,
when abandoned at the end of an episode, pursue an ‘unrecorded existence’

until the next one begins. In other words, we are aware that day-to-day life has
continued in our absence even though the problem we left at the end of the
previous episode has still to be resolved.18
The absence of a tight causality in which narrative logic follows the her-
meneutic chain along a narrowing horizon of possibilities towards resol-
ution, permits a narrative, she argues, ‘whose future is not yet written’:
56
The apparent multifariousness of the plots, their inextricability from each

other, the everyday quality of time and events, all encourage us to believe that
this is a narrative whose future is not yet written. Even events which would
offer a suitable ending in other narrative forms are never a final ending in the
continuous serial: a wedding is not a happy ending but opens up the possi-
bilities of stories about married life and divorce; a character’s departure from a
serial does not mean that s/he will not turn up again several years later.19
Though death may be a special case, and is frequently memorialised as such

in the long historical imaginaries of committed viewers, even death may not
be the end.
The accumulation of memory in a long-running serial and the absence of
an already determined future means that the viewer has a relationship to the
fiction which is similar to her or his relationship to the communities of
everyday life. It is distinct from other forms of narrative in that knowledge is
differential: some viewers will have a complete history of, for example, Ken
Barlow, one of Coronation Street’s longest-running characters, and his
marriages and relationships since the 1960s, whereas others will only have
a knowledge of his recent past. (His remarriage to Deirdre Langton in 2005
had an audience of thirteen million; the actual marriage of Prince Charles
and Camilla Parker Bowles the following day had nine million.) There is no
definitive, shared knowledge which can be assumed by producers or
claimed by viewers. Consequently, producers must find ways of filling in
any backstory that is essential to a plot move, through, for example, the
exchange of gossip in the pub, and viewers may constantly debate likely
outcomes depending on the degree of knowledge of past behaviours which
they bring to the historical ‘life’ of the serial. In a narrative whose ‘future is
not yet written’, this predictive speculation is central, demanding an open
and adaptable engagement. As Geraghty points out, some characters will
behave according to type; others, more individuated, are there precisely to
overturn expectations and upset routines.
In a narrative in which we bring to the dilemmas of the fiction the same
personal skills and differentiated knowledge that we bring to the dilemmas
of the everyday life-world, our engagement with the fictional characters and
their lives can no longer be described in the language of identification and
distanciation which forms the currency of the classic realist text. Instead, it
is an engagement of familiarity and recognition that may transcend the
mechanistic requirements of ‘passive subjectivity’. In a highly influential
article published in 1983, ‘The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television
and Women’s Work’, the American feminist critic Tania Modleski argues
that ‘the flow of daytime television reinforces the very principle of inter-
ruptability crucial to the proper functioning of women in the home’,20 and
57
john caughie
she borrows from Luce Irigaray the term ‘nearness’ to describe the form of
engagement and the mode of attention: ‘The viewer does not become the
characters . . . but rather relates to them as intimates, as extensions of her
world.’21 This ‘nearness’, a mundane, ordinary, and sometimes banal famili-
arity based on a history and memory of characters and on a narrative for
which the future does not seem to have been written, is one of the dominant
and specific modes of experience in the popular fictions of everyday
television.
But not all television is everyday. While the continuous serial of soap
opera may provide the classical ground for popular serial fiction on televi-
sion, it is the variations and innovations on this ground which occupy
the prestige slots in the schedules and in the critical press: the crime series,
the classic serial adaptations, authored serials, HBO. Characteristically, the
continuous serials are scheduled to fit the routines of domestic life; the
prestige serials are shown in primetime, typically the 9pm slot, and, increas-
ingly, they are consumed and watched in DVD box sets – television serials,
in other words, which have become almost independent of everyday televi-
sion, designed to be viewed within a more or less ‘specialised time’, con-
trolled by the viewer rather than by the schedules.
Clearly, this changes forms of attention. Engagement can no longer be
described using the terms of nearness and familiarity that characterise
engagement with the routines of domestic television. An aesthetic of
dilemma, however, rather than of cause and effect ordered around closure
may still be mobilised to explain one of the curious features of the contem-
porary prestige serial: the pleasure of bafflement. Despite the fact that she
‘missed the first two episodes and couldn’t follow the plot sufficiently to
work out who the baddie actually was!’, a viewer writes to the Radio Times
that she found the Troy Kennedy Martin serial, Edge of Darkness (BBC,
1985), ‘one of the three most exciting thrillers I have ever seen on televi-
sion’.22 This is a significant shift in our expectations of popular narrative
form: a new-found pleasure in losing one’s bearings; an openness to – or
appetite for – forms of narrative which sustain attention and pleasure
without all the narrative links being in place. Whether it be Spooks or The
Wire (HBO, 2002–8), complex narratives, complete with indeterminate
motivations and loose inconclusive endings, once the territory of the
European art movie and the guarantee of intellectual standing, have been
the increasingly common currency of prestigious popular television crime
and conspiracy serials since the 1980s. Far from being an impediment to
enjoyment, deciphering untidy narratives has become part of the increas-
ingly inductive skill of making sense of popular fiction, and being baffled
by narrative has become part of its enticement.
58
In a sermon at Rugby Chapel in 1839, now much quoted in accounts of

nineteenth-century serialisation, Dr Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby
School, reformer of public school education and the model of progressive
education in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, friend of Coleridge and father of
Matthew Arnold, laments the rising appeal of the popular, affordable novel
in serial form, warning against its capacity for ‘dwelling upon the mind’.
The works of amusement published only a few years since were comparatively
few in number; they were less exciting, and therefore less attractive; they were
dearer, and therefore less accessible; and, not being published periodically, did
not occupy the mind for so long a time, nor keep alive so constant an
expectation; nor by thus dwelling upon the mind, and distilling themselves
into it, as it were drop by drop, did they possess it so largely, colouring even,
in many instances, its very language, and affording frequent matter for
conversation . . . They are of that class which cannot be actually prohibited;
nor can it be pretended that there is a sin in reading them. They are not the
more wicked for being published so cheap, and at regular intervals; but yet
these two circumstances make them so peculiarly injurious.23
Writing only two years after the huge success of The Pickwick Papers
(Dickens, 1836) in serial form, the power of serialisation, Arnold believes,
was derived from the extension in time of the serial, which ‘occup[ied] the
mind for so long a time’, and kept alive ‘so constant an expectation’.
This points to serialisation not simply as a narrative form but also as an
epistemology. Writing about the beginnings of the serialised narrative form,
Caroline Levine, in her book, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian
Realism and Narrative Doubt, identifies the suspense and the extension of
time associated with serialisation not simply as a way of organising narra-
tive but as the manifestation of an epistemology which was cultivated by the
scientific as well as the imaginative writing of the Victorians. ‘Nineteenth-
century scientists and philosophers’, she says,
insisted that a doubtful pause was absolutely essential to the pursuit of

knowledge. If we were not compelled to suspend judgement, they argued,
we would simply rush to assume that our prejudices were true and right, and
we would fail to open ourselves up to the possibility of unexpected truths and
surprises. From this epistemological perspective, novelistic suspense per-
formed a critical cultural role: narrative enigmas and delays could help to
foster habits of hesitation and uncertainty. In the space between the mystery
and its revelation, audiences were forced to wait and wonder, unable to say for
sure whether their assumptions would fit the facts. Novelistic mysteries thus
seemed to demand a kind of cultural and ideological self-restraint: they asked
readers to ready themselves for the potential failures of belief and tradition
when set against the surprising, unconventional otherness of the world.24
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john caughie
The form which this suspension took in the quest for scientific knowledge
was the experiment, which held belief and speculation in suspense while
they were verified against the evidence of the world: ‘the imagination was a
necessary but disorderly force in science, the activity of experimentation
alone could ensure that it was put to good use’.25 The nineteenth-century
novel, then, belonged to a much wider ‘episteme’, a way of understanding
the world through experiment and through making connections. In her
major work, Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer also emphasises the links between
scientific and imaginative literature in uncovering connections and estab-
lishing the connectedness of worlds.
Darwin’s theories profoundly unsettled the organizing principles of much
Victorian thinking but it is all the more worth registering, therefore, the extent
to which the relations of structures in his work initially share common
concerns, and draw on orderings of experience learnt from other writers of
the time. The sense that everything is connected, though the connections may
be obscured, gave urgency to the enterprise of uncovering such connections.
This was a form of plotting crucial to Dickens’s work, as we can see, for
example, in Bleak House, where the fifty-six named – and many more
unnamed – characters all turn out to be related either by way of concealed
descent (Esther and Lady Deadlock) or of economic dependency . . . As the
book proceeds the immense assemblage of apparently contingent characters is
ordered and reordered into multiple sets of relations so that we discover that
all of them are interdependent. What at first looks like agglomeration proves
to be analysable connection.26
The contemporary serial or series, then, cannot simply be explained formal-

istically, but draws on an epistemology which it shares with the serial novels
of the Victorian period, an epistemology of experiment which seeks ‘analys-
able connections’ between worlds and the people who inhabit them, rather
than the linear drive of deductive investigation which reduces the world to
clues. Think of those new totems of quality popular television: The Sopranos
(HBO, 1999–2007) and The Wire. Each uses the long form of the serial to
allow itself a configuration of space, time, characterisation and performance
which is not reducible to narrative causality, but which describes worlds and
maps the connectedness and entanglements between them. Episodic time is
not simply a narrative structure, a hook to bring the audience back week after
week, but an experimental epistemology which sets in motion little dramas of
connectedness, and asks viewers, in Caroline Levine’s terms, ‘to ready them-
selves for the potential failures of belief and tradition when set against the
surprising, unconventional otherness of the world’.27
On British television, a particular trajectory within the serial form can be
traced to a group of television dramas from the late 1970s to the 1990s:
60
Pennies from Heaven (BBC, w. Denis Potter, 1978), Boys from the Black-
stuff (BBC, w. Alan Bleasdale, 1982), Edge of Darkness (BBC, w. Troy
Kennedy Martin, 1985), The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (BBC, w. Fay
Weldon, 1986), The Monocled Mutineer (BBC, w. Alan Bleasdale, 1986),
The Singing Detective (BBC, w. Denis Potter, 1986), Tutti Frutti (BBC, w.
John Byrne, 1987), GBH (Channel 4, w. Alan Bleasdale, 1991), Shooting
the Past (BBC, w. and d. Stephen Poliakoff, 1999). Each of them can be
placed in the category of ‘authored serials’, a category which is largely
responsible for the displacement of ‘seriousness’ in television drama from
the single play to the serial. Thematically, however, they seem also to share a
particular epistemology, a way of knowing the world that is unfolded
through serialisation. Each of them uses the long form of the extended
narrative to chart the erosion of everyday normality by unreason, irration-
ality and even magic. Each traces the gradual, sometimes almost impercept-
ible intrusion of the psychosis of institutions and individuals into the social
realism and everyday worlds of the serial form, slowly turning the comedy
black, the musical discordant, or the investigative thriller apocalyptic: the
increasingly neurotic twitch in Robert Lindsay’s eye in GBH, for example,
the steady downward spiral from musical comedy to self-immolation in
Tutti Frutti, the ‘promise’ of ultimate suicide in Shooting the Past, or the
movement from corporate rationality to mythical irrationality in Edge of
Darkness. The effect of serialised time is to begin from what are taken to be
social realities or generic norms and then slowly undermine and overturn
them by infiltrating the conventions with madness or magic: social and
political rationalities spin out of control into irrationality; administrative
rationality is exposed in all its destructiveness and danger. The serial form,
often regarded as comfortable and reassuring, is what makes these dramas
subversive. The fact that they take time, ‘occupying the mind for so long a
time . . . distilling themselves into it, as it were drop by drop’ is precisely, as
Thomas Arnold knew, what makes them ‘so peculiarly injurious’.
The connection between the form of the ‘prestige serial’ and the form
of the continuous serial of soap opera was quite self-consciously exploited
in the 2005 Bleak House adapted by Andrew Davies. After an initial
one-hour episode, this eight-hour ‘classic serial’ was transmitted over
eight weeks in fourteen half-hour episodes on BBC1 (the 1853 novel was
published in twenty monthly instalments), appearing twice weekly on
Thursdays at 8 p.m. and Fridays at 8.30 p.m., immediately following the
BBC’s most popular long-running continuous serial, EastEnders (BBC,
1985–). The BBC’s press pack encouraged the association with the soap
opera format under the headline, ‘Bleak House gets the soap opera treat-
ment for BBC ONE’:
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john caughie
It’s a new way of doing the classic adaptation, reinvigorating our approach to
the serial form, matching it to the serial structure and narrative development
of the original – and the way that it was originally published. The Dickens
novel was very much the soap opera of its day, and we hope to emulate those
same cliffhanger emotions in televisual terms.28
‘If Charles Dickens were alive today,’ said producer, Nigel Stafford-Clark,
‘he would probably be writing big signature dramas like State of Play or
Shameless. He would be writing for television because he recognised a
popular medium when he saw it.’29 This position was taken a stage further
by Andrew Davies himself, who suggested ‘If Dickens was alive today, he’d
be writing for EastEnders.’30
This appropriation of Dickens into the ranks of popular television is, of
course, good marketing and the easy critical response is to dismiss it as such.
It does, however, raise interesting questions about the historical nature of
popularity, about the difference between monthly instalments and twice-
weekly episodes, and, fundamentally, about the difference between televi-
sion popular drama and literary fiction. The well-established tradition of
the ‘classic serial’, translated into American television as ‘Masterpiece
Theatre’, raises the question of television drama both as popular fiction
and as the popularising of classic fiction.
In a rather ill-considered article in The Guardian, the novelist, Philip
Hensher, declares that he has not and will not watch this adaptation of
Bleak House. He proceeds, on the basis of not needing to watch it, to review
its assumed deficiencies and omissions; and concludes, ‘Bleak House only
lives as 400,000 words, in paperback or hardcover. That is all it is.’31 The
omissions, he assumes, will include ‘Krook’s list of the names of Miss Flite’s
twenty-five pet birds’. In fact, had Hensher watched the adaptation, he
would have found the list of names intact – Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest,
Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning,
Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon
and Spinach – all are there, lifted from the page and transformed in a
performance of such mounting ferocity by Johnny Vegas/Krook that one is
driven back to the pages of the original to reassure oneself that Dickens
really was so much a surrealist avant la lettre. As his contemporaries in the
theatre recognised, often at the expense of Dickens’s intellectual property
rights, and as Dickens himself discovered to his immense profit, Dickens
performed is something more than words in paperback or hardback.
‘I’ve heard’, says Hensher, ‘that there is no fog to be seen anywhere,
which seems rather like filming Moby Dick without the sea.’ It is true that
fog is notable by its absence – according to Andrew Davies, in a disarmingly
temperate response to Hensher’s haughty provocation, because the producers
62
could not find a way of stopping the attempts at fog from being blown away
by the slightest breeze32 – but the mannerism of Dickens’s allegorical
invocation of the fog is replicated in a highly mannered visual rhetoric.
The cramped darkly lit spaces, damp muddy streets, cuts in location without
establishing shots, swish pans, rapid zooms, jump cuts and a highly elabor-
ate and expressive soundscape create that same Chancery world which has,
‘in the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows
what it means’.33
Hensher’s somewhat throwaway judgement is merely an extreme form of
a prejudice against television adaptation which is often shared, on one side,
by literary scholars who believe that television debases literature and, on the
other, by television scholars who believe that literature ‘elevates’ television
to an elite culture which betrays its popular roots. What both sides seem to
miss is the extent to which serial adaptation allows us to delineate more
clearly the contours of the popular and ‘popularisation’, and the determin-
ate specificities of the literary and the televisual. If Dickens were alive today,
he would probably not be writing scripts for soap operas because his fiction
is literary and depends on a literary language whose literariness is, as
Roman Jakobson explains, ‘language calling attention to itself’ where ‘the
emphasis is placed on the form of the utterance rather than on its referential
capacity’ (see Belen Villasur Vidal for a discussion of literariness in televi-
sion adaptation34). In Dickens’s Bleak House, this literariness is apparent in
the rhetoric and the layering of narrative voices: the narration is divided
between ‘Esther’s Narrative’, told from the first-person, limited and some-
times cloyingly naı̈ve perspective of Esther, and a worldly-wise, omniscient
authorial voice whose perspective is, unusually, always told from a per-
petual present tense. The complexity of the Dickens narrative, a value
much treasured by Philip Hensher, is a literary complexity of voices,
language and perspective which cannot be translated literally, and would
be simply inappropriate to the specific signifying systems of television.
But it can be adapted. There is in this television Bleak House a process of
translation which replaces verbal mannerism with visual and aural density
and replicates the hesitations and uncertainties of the serial form. It is
dependent on the doubtful pauses that Caroline Levine speaks of, and
pursues the orderings into analysable connections which Gillian Beer finds
in Dickens’s novel. While the literariness of literature resists adaptation, the
epistemology of serialisation and suspense, and of the montage of time and
space, is the determining form of a television long-form narrative which
respects complexity. Visually, the complexity is dramatised in the televisual
rhetoric of swish pans and zooms; the three-shot pattern to establish a new
location (cut to still; cut to still; cut to action); a soundscape which gives
63
john caughie
expression and emphasis to the action rather than simply accompanying it.
The steadicam, particularly in close-up, gives fluidity to the movement, but,
at the same time, in its slight shake it gives an impression of immediacy in
which the frame seems to discover the scene rather than simply to enclose it.
At the end of Episode 2, there is a sequence which begins with Krook,
talking to his cat while examining what he believes to be love letters found
in Nemo’s trunk, and cuts without establishing shot to Chesney Wold and to
Lady Dedlock, indistinct behind the light of candles, walking in medium
close-up right to left; cut to close-up of Tulkinghorn, lit by candlelight in his
office, facing right; cut back to Lady Dedlock in big close-up facing left; cut
to close-up of Tulkinghorn; cut to Lady Dedlock, in big close-up facing
right, her eyes glinting in the light of two candles; cut to frontal shot of Lady
Dedlock in medium close-up, the camera holding as a tear runs down her
cheek; cut to long shot of Lady Dedlock from same angle, isolated in a pool
of candlelight within a dark frame; the frame loses focus and fades to black;
end of episode and the credits roll. The parallel editing, the device which
Eisenstein says D. W. Griffith learnt from reading Dickens,35 is accompan-
ied by a music and electronic soundscape which unites the action in time,
but offers no speech to explain it. The close-ups on both Tulkinghorn and
Lady Dedlock, and their juxtaposition, are full of meaning, but none of it is
verbal. It depends on a visual language in which ‘the emphasis is placed on
the form of the utterance rather than on its referential capacity’.
Visually complex, the adaptation nonetheless has clear roots in popular
fiction. Early in Episode 1, in the scene at Bleak House in which Skimpole is
introduced, Skimpole, Jarndyce, Richard and Esther are gathered round the
piano on which Ada plays. There are two intense and signifying looks: first
Richard looks at Ada; then John Jarndyce looks at Esther. Richard’s look is
reciprocated by Ada, Jarndyce’s look is not registered by Esther. Nothing is
said, but a relationship of looks is established which is repeated at intervals
from episode to episode. The fact that Jarndyce’s interest in Esther goes
beyond that of a guardian is signalled much earlier in the television narra-
tive than in the novel. In the novel, rather later than in the adaptation,
Esther, in her naı̈ve first-person narrative, ‘mistakes’ Jarndyce’s feelings for
her when she expresses her gratitude for ‘a guardian who is a Father to her’.
At the word Father, I saw his former trouble come into his face. He subdued it
as before, and it was gone in an instant; but it had been there, and it had come
so swiftly upon my words that I felt as if they had given him a shock.36
The scene is faithfully repeated in the adaptation, but here the discomfiture
of Jarndyce is physical and visible, there to be read not only by Esther, who,
naı̈vely, does not understand it, but also by the viewer who, knowingly,
64
does. On television, Esther’s reaction is visible, and whereas in the first-

person literary narrative it only has meaning in the externalisation into
language, in the visual narrative its meaning is inductive, read in the rhetoric
of the image, more immediately available to the viewer than to Esther.
Reading the romance through signs and gestures which are unacknowl-
edged or misunderstood by the fictional characters is one of the skills we
have honed from our viewing of everyday popular television. We are able to
read the narrative of Jarndyce’s attraction to Esther quite independently of
Esther’s voice, but dependent on our familiarity with the convention of
meaningful but silent looks which we have learned from popular fiction
on film and television.
Despite its scheduling and its segmentation into half-hour episodes and its
use of actors who are already familiar from popular television (Gillian
Anderson and Johnny Vegas), and despite its own self-promotion and
marketing, Bleak House is not soap opera. But there are both continuities
and differences between Bleak House on television and Bleak House as
400,000 words in paperback or hardback which it is genuinely illuminating
to engage with on an analytical level. Such analysis, rather than dismissive
judgements, might allow us better to understand the literariness of literature
and the visuality of television, and the possibilities of translation between
them. In particular, it might open up questions of the popularity of popular
fiction in a historical way; of the forms of attention and modes of under-
standing which we bring to long-form and continuous narratives which
‘dwell upon the mind, and distil themselves into it, as it were drop by drop’;
and of the ‘new human faculties’, the ‘structures of feeling’ and the subject-
ivities which popular fiction and serialisation might bring into being. One of
the ‘fundamental qualitative changes’ which Williams anticipated in 1974, a
small, ambiguous and tentative step in the ‘long revolution’, may indeed be
an almost unnoticed extension of the critical and perceptive reading of
television’s popular fiction as an everyday activity rather than as a special-
ised professional practice. The viewer in the age of electronic dissemination,
as Walter Benjamin might have said, is a critic, even when distracted.37
NOTES
1 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana,
1974), p. 86.
2 Ibid., p. 59.
3 Ibid., p. 151.
4 Ibid.
5 See Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso,
1991), p. 97.
65
john caughie
6 Williams, Television, p. 60.

7 Ibid., p. 61.
8 See M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and the Novel’ and ‘From the Pre-history of Novelistic
Discourse’, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
9 Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (New York:
Dover, 1970), pp. 21, 33.
10 Ibid., p. 48.
11 Report of the Committee on Broadcasting [Pilkington Committee] (London:
HMSO, 1962), Cmnd. 1753.
12 Report of the Committee on Financing the BBC [Peacock Committee] (London:
HMSO, 1986), Cmnd. 9824.
13 John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2002).
14 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Radio On’, Screen 20:3/4 (Winter 1979/80): 29.
15 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Reader’ (1940), in ‘“Anon” and “The Reader”: Virginia
Woolf’s Last Essays’, in Brenda R. Silver (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literature,
25:3/4 (Fall/Winter 1979): 429.
16 John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge, 1982),
pp. 111–26.
17 Carl Grabo, The Technique of the Novel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1928), p. 67.
18 Christine Geraghty, ‘The Continuous Serial – A Definition’, in Richard Dyer,
Christine Geraghty, Marion Jordan, Terry Lovell, Richard Paterson and John
Stewart, Coronation Street (London: BFI Publishing (Television Monograph
series), 1981), p. 10.
19 Ibid., p. 11.
20 Tania Modleski, ‘The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s
Work’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Regarding Television: Critical Approaches
(Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1983), p. 71.
21 Ibid., p. 69.
22 Viewers’ letters, Radio Times, 11–17 January 1986, p. 80.
23 Thomas Arnold, Christian Life, Its Course, Its Hindrances, and Its Helps: Sermons,
Preached Mostly in the Chapel of Rugby School [1845], quoted in Linda K.
Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville, VA, and London:
University Press of Virginia, 1991), pp. 2–3.
24 Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narra-
tive Doubt (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 3.
25 Ibid., p. 5.
26 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot
and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983),
p. 47.
27 Ibid., p. 3.
28 BBC Press Office, 19 December 2003.
29 BBC Press Office, 4 October 2005.
30 Quoted by Robert Giddings (undated), ‘Soft-soaping Dickens: Andrew Davies,
BBC1 and Bleak House’, on David Purdue’s Charles Dickens Page, http://
charlesdickenspage.com/Soft_Soaping_Dickens.html, accessed 11.01.10.
66
31 Philip Hensher, ‘You’ll Never Catch Me Watching it’, The Guardian, 7 November
2005. Available online at www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/nov/07/broadcasting.
arts, accessed, 12.01.10.
32 Andrew Davies, ‘Critical Dedlock’, Guardian Unlimited, 9 November 2005:
www.guardian.co.uk/culture/culturevultureblog/2005/nov/09/criticaldedloc,
accessed 9.06.10.
33 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), ed. Nicola Bradbury (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1996), p. 16.
34 Belen Villasur Vidal, ‘Classic Adaptations, Modern Reinventions: Reading the
Image in the Contemporary Literary Film’, Screen 43:1 (Spring 2002): 8.
35 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today’ (1944), in Eisenstein,
Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1949), pp. 195–255.
36 Dickens, Bleak House, p. 277.
37 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production’
(1935), in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London:
Fontana, 1973), pp. 211–44.
67
4
ROGER LUCKHURST
The public sphere, popular culture

and the true meaning of the
zombie apocalypse
One of the standard denigrations of popular culture since the rise of its
mass, industrial forms in the nineteenth century is that it debases appropri-
ate public representations and discourse. Where we might hope for discern-
ment, popular culture offers uncritical gorging and passive absorption.
Where we might have had ambitions for informed and critical public
opinion, we get instead sensation and emotional excess. The popular is
something that cheapens public discourse, which mesmerises its mass
audience with spectacle and threatens, as one panicked critic put it in the
1950s, ‘to engulf everything with its spreading ooze’, like something out of
The Blob.1 This disdain is shared across the political spectrum. In the
immediate post-1945 era, cultural conservatives like Evelyn Waugh saw
an aristocratic cultural heritage being sacrificed for bloodless meritocracy,
the world made safe ‘for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-
nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures’.2 A liberal like Richard
Hoggart, founding professor of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, worried that authentic traditions of English proletarian
culture were being destroyed by American mass culture, ‘a myth-world
compounded of a few simple elements’ that had been garnered from ‘crime,
science fiction and sex novelettes’.3 On the left, the pessimism of the
Marxists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer led them to denounce
the ‘culture industry’, as they witnessed it in exile in the 1940s in America,
as a destruction of the critical capacities of serious art and its replacement
by the mechanical repetition and indoctrinations of capitalist mass enter-
tainment.4 Popular culture everywhere destroys any chance of a proper
public culture.
What is the notion of the public that is being implicitly defended here?
Since 1989, these debates have been crystallised by the English translation
of Jürgen Habermas’s book, The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere. Habermas, a hugely influential German sociologist and philosopher,
offers a model of what he calls ‘the public sphere’ in which culture, and
68
Popular culture and the zombie apocalypse
literature in particular, has a surprisingly pivotal part to play. His book has
generated a host of controversies, challenges, refinements and corrective
accounts. And if Habermas disappointingly repeats the unreflective view of
popular culture as a menace to the public sphere, it turns out that the very
terms of his argument might allow for a re-conceptualisation of this tension
between popular and public. Therefore, after first exploring Habermas’s
idea of the public sphere, and its limits, I want to try to concretise these
often very abstract formulations by considering the case of the Gothic
horror genre and zombie fictions in particular for what they might have to
offer as a commentary on notions of criticism and agreement in public
debate.
The public sphere

Habermas was born into a middle-class German family in 1929, and
consequently briefly experienced an obligatory membership of the Hitler
Youth at the end of the Second World War. In the late 1940s, he studied
under the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who also had his complicities with
the National Socialist state, before switching allegiance to work as a
research assistant to the Marxist Theodor Adorno at the famous Institute
for Social Research in Frankfurt. When Habermas published Strukturwan-
del der Öffentlichkeit (which also refers to the structural transformation of
publicness, openness, or transparency) in 1962, he had distanced himself
from both extremes and settled as a liberal defender of the enlightenment
tradition of political and social thought. His position was encapsulated in
the inaugural lecture he gave when taking up the professorial chair once
occupied by Adorno: ‘Modernity – an Unfinished Project’.5 He has
remained fully committed to models of democratic parliamentary state-
hood, reflexive rationality and a belief in a progressive unfolding of liber-
ation from restrictive beliefs and practices. These positions are adopted
directly from the philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
When Structural Transformation was finally published in English in 1989,
it appeared at a moment when the British and American academies were
most enamoured of ‘postmodernism’, a term often understood as announc-
ing either the end or at the very least the internal collapse of the enlighten-
ment project in the ruins of the twentieth century’s atrocious history.
According to this view, grand narratives of liberation and progressive
enlightenment were finished. Habermas dismissed the French ‘deconstruc-
tion’ of the Enlightenment by theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel
Foucault as ‘neo-conservative’. Sparks flew.6 In literary and cultural studies
Habermas became the whipping boy for postmodernists, and although that
69
roger luckhurst
fashion has passed, Habermas remains fairly marginal in these disciplines.

Meanwhile, political theorists and sociologists began to pick over the
potential of the notion of the public sphere, which placed literature at its
foundational centre.
Structural Transformation presents a historical sketch of the rise of the
modern public sphere. This is defined as ‘a forum in which the private
people come together to form a public, [and] readied themselves to compel
public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion’.7 The emergence
of public spaces for dialogue and dispute, separate from the state or econ-
omy or the private spheres of civil society, is a distinctly modern formation.
When feudal states and absolutist kings exerted power on their subjects,
there was no need for, or conception of, a ‘public’. The emergent democratic
states of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, had
to grasp the power of ‘public opinion’ which political parties, ruling elites
and institutions of the state had to acknowledge, foster, persuade or cajole.
For Habermas, the public sphere is the space that emerges in the transac-
tions and gossip of mercantile trade exchanges, in the coffee houses where
merchants met, in artistic salons, philosophical, scientific and literary insti-
tutes, and in the rise of information and intelligence gathering services that
became newspapers and political or critical journals. These were the spaces
that allowed what Habermas idealistically identifies as the people’s public
exercise of their critical reason. From this host of free exchanges of ideas
emerges the virtual or imaginary projection of a consensus called ‘public
opinion’. The public sphere is therefore a central element of modernity and
enlightenment: it is a space where, according to Habermas, any contribu-
tion to discourse that met minimal requirements of what he later called
‘communicative rationality’ was able to issue challenges to all traditional
authorities of church and state. Fair hearing would result in debates from
which a rational consensus would then develop and society progress.
Habermas calls the first modern form of this new space the bourgeois
public sphere, because it can be principally identified with the world of the
emergent mercantile middle classes that drove the engines of modern capi-
talism and began to reconstitute (or even overthrow) traditional state forma-
tions. Rather surprisingly, Habermas suggests that the literary culture of
London coffee houses in the early eighteenth century might serve not just as
a first version of the public sphere but actually as its ideal form – as a model
that has never been bettered. Here, in Habermas’s account, private individ-
uals met and conversed with wit and conviviality braced by a new commit-
ment to enlightened, sceptical philosophy.8 These small publics were then
extended through publications, with the rise of journals like Tatler and The
Spectator broadcasting their model of discourse to a wider, virtual public. As
70
publishing moved from models of private patronage to public commercial

enterprises, print culture generated an ever-wider circulation of opinions
about politics, ethics, art and culture. Commentary was exploratory, but also
normative: it provided the means to debate and then influence public mores.
In this regard, the new literary form of the novel was crucial. Rather like Ian
Watt’s earlier argument in The Rise of the Novel (1957), Habermas sees
fiction as a laboratory for experimenting with how to represent private
bourgeois subjectivity in public discourse. The private experience of reading
a published novel was a bridge that could help forge a sense of the public
sphere, since these texts were ‘psychologically interested in what was
“human”, in self-knowledge and in empathy’ (p. 50). In a mutually reinfor-
cing loop between ‘realist’ fiction and its nascent public, the reader imagin-
atively recreated the relationships depicted in print, drawing upon past
experiences in order to bring them to life in the mind’s eye; and in turn fiction
provided a way of preparing oneself for new everyday relations with others.
What followed was a practice of literary criticism bringing together private
individuals who ‘reflected critically and in public on what they had read, thus
contributing to the process of enlightenment’ (p. 51). The exchange of views
encouraged the growth of reading circles, subscription libraries and other
channels of literary debate. In this way, Habermas argues that the world of
letters was one of the key generators of the bourgeois public sphere.
The ‘structural transformation’ that Habermas wishes to analyse comes
in the wake of this early formation. Because he considers the first form of
the public sphere the ideal version, any historical changes can only be
regarded as a falling away. Habermas emphasises over and over again that
the bourgeois public sphere was only in principle universal, inclusive and
rational, although in practice he recognises that it was limited to a small
cohesive group of middle-class men (a point made frequently in feminist
critiques).9 Yet because Habermas fuses an abstract philosophical ideal with
a complex historical reality, the social progress that educates and enfran-
chises ever greater numbers from the non-propertied middle classes, the
working classes, and eventually women throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries is necessarily a narrative of decline in which the inte-
grated network of discussion groups he identifies begins to weaken.
Habermas’s reading of the trajectory of the public sphere thus looks some-
what conservative. 1848, the year of revolutions across Europe, marks for
Habermas the moment when the bourgeois public sphere is split apart. As
the reading public grew in size it became less socially exclusive and more
divided politically. Consequently, the public sphere ‘became an arena of
competing interests fought out in the coarser forms of violent conflict’
(p. 132). Habermas’s commitment to the exercise of consensual rational
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debate cannot conceive that workers’ demands (or any other group that had
been constitutively excluded from the bourgeois settlement) might have to
breach the very framework of consensus and cohesion in order to make
their voices heard. As the chance of extending the ‘public’ expands through
literacy and legislation, his ideal public sphere strains to cohere.
Habermas also bemoans the consequences of the rise of the ‘welfare state’
after the economic crises of the 1870s. The welfare state might well pro-
gressively protect citizens from the depredations of poverty, ignorance and
illness by organising structures of welfare protection, compulsory education
and a health service, but for Habermas such advances have unforeseen
consequences for the public sphere. The bureaucratic extension of the state
means that previously autonomous spheres of life are brought under the
purview of institutional state power. ‘State and social institutions fused into
a single functional complex’, Habermas argues, and ‘can no longer be
differentiated according to criteria of public and private’ (p. 148). Whilst
private life and civil society become matters of government interference, the
public sphere risks being swallowed by the machineries of market and state.
Culture becomes mass culture. Communications are controlled either by a
strong state or are concentrated into the hands of media moguls and thus
the free exercise of critical reason becomes the tool of vested interests:
‘Today the conversation is itself administered’ (p. 164).
Against this pessimistic assessment of the decline of the public sphere,
Habermas’s subsequent work has attempted to develop a theory of ‘com-
municative rationality’ through which the lifeworld (which includes the
public sphere) might be defended from what he sees as the intrusions of
the system (that is, state and economic imperatives). At the end of his
monumental Theory of Communicative Action (1987), Habermas outlines
the chance of new political movements emerging in protest just where the
system has begun to threaten to ‘colonise’ elements of the lifeworld – in
feminism, ecology, anti-nuclear campaigns (the book was completed before
the rise of anti-globalisation protests in the 1990s). And against the ‘admin-
istered’ pseudo-conversation of the mass media, he hopefully points to ‘a
counterweight of emancipatory potential built into communication struc-
tures themselves’ that means that voices of criticism can still be heard.10
Throughout, Habermas is trying to recover that lost public sphere of the
Enlightenment, where critical reason was exchanged in equality, disinterest
and freedom and so worked towards consensus.
Criticism of this analysis has inevitably focused on Habermas’s idealis-
ation of a highly restricted literary world of letters and the notion that a
disinterested reason can rise above the exercise of power, ideology or other
investments. Habermas simply dismisses a swathe of thought from Marx,
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Nietzsche and Freud that has put pressure, in very different ways, on such
enlightened hopes. Moreover, some critics have suggested that Habermas’s
insistence on non-coercive consensus in the public sphere must in itself be
intrinsically coercive. As a result, there have been a number of important
attempts to develop the idea of other kinds of public sphere, whether
proletarian, transgressive or counterpublic.11 Counterpublics, as described
by Michael Warner, are ‘formed by their conflict with the norms and
contexts of their cultural environment’ and have been defined by Nancy
Fraser as ‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social
groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses’.12 This notion will come in
useful shortly, but first we need to tease out fully the conservative assump-
tions that underlie Habermas’s notion of popular culture.
‘Public’ versus ‘popular’

The bourgeois public sphere collapses because its integrity is put under
strain by expansion and massification: in other words, by the rise of modern
popular fiction. Habermas is completely clear about this. Already by the
end of the eighteenth century, literary productions were degenerating
because ‘the laws of the market have already penetrated into the substance
of the works themselves’ (p. 165). A small public sphere of production and
active collaboration is replaced by an anonymous mass market of textual
products made for passive consumption. With new print technologies
pumping out materials aimed at a mass literate audience, cultural quality
declines. Here mass culture involves maximising sales by pushing towards
the lowest common denominator and offering pure entertainment.
Habermas is unapologetic about the elitism of his position: ‘Serious involve-
ment with culture produces facility, while the consumption of mass culture
leaves no trace’ (p. 166). Compared to the psychological and social enrich-
ments of proper culture, popular culture must be considered to be vacuous
and superficial, leading nowhere.
This argument conforms to a very familiar model of cultural commentary.
As Raymond Williams observes in his essay on the meanings of ‘popular’ in his
compendium of Keywords, the term picks up new derogatory senses in the
course of the nineteenth century. Where popularis had once meant ‘belonging
to the people’, ‘Popular culture was not identified by the people, but by
others, and it still carries two older senses: inferior kinds of work (cf. popular
literature, popular press as distinguished from quality press); and work delib-
erately setting out to win favour (popular journalism as distinguished from
democratic journalism, or popular entertainment).’13 Actually, Habermas
might well have been borrowing directly from Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the
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Reading Public, a deeply conservative account of the decline of English litera-

ture first published in 1932, but which has cast a lengthy shadow over concep-
tions of what English Literature should be on university degrees.
Leavis also idealised the ‘reading public’ of the eighteenth century, a
‘homogeneous’ world of civilised cultural exchange embodied in Tatler
and The Spectator.14 Yet this world was already sowing the seeds of its
destruction with the rise of the circulating library and the insatiable demand
of a large readership for novels: ‘The readiness to read a good novel had
become a craving for fiction of any kind, and a habit of reading poor novels
not only destroys the ability to distinguish between literature and trash, it
creates a positive taste for a certain kind of writing, if only because it does
not demand the effort of a fresh response.’15 The popularity of Charles
Dickens’s serial fictions from the 1830s is seen as strong evidence of a fast
decline: his works are magisterially dismissed as ‘a set of crude emotional
exercises’.16 Dickens has always served as a common measure of the
debased popular: sentimental and emotional, instead of analytic and
rational.17 Yet for Leavis, the real collapse came at the end of nineteenth
century with the rise of the ‘bestseller’ and tabloid journalism. This marks
the final ‘collapse of authority’ of any critical public and the triumph of the
‘herd instinct’.18 As Stefan Collini has observed, this has proved an oft-
repeated narrative of decline.19
If Habermas conforms so drearily to this conservative account of decline and
fall, what does he have to offer a student of popular fiction? My proposition is
that Habermas is worth rescuing because of his insistence that culture can be at
the centre of the public sphere, providing a crucial arena for public disputation
and debate. If we can dissolve the opposition between the ‘popular’ and the
‘public’ and renovate Habermas’s model to include a variety of publics and
counterpublics and low and high cultural forms, then popular fiction can be
thought of as a significant arena for cultural commentary that is far from being
automatically crude, debased and anti-rational. Instead, it can be at the heart
of public debate. I want to test the possibility of this renovation to the limit
by investigating that frequently much-despised form of popular culture, the
Gothic. Ultimately, I want to propose that our current obsession with imagin-
ing zombie apocalypses can best be understood as intimately connected to
anxieties about the future of the public sphere itself.
The Gothic
The rise of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century, often considered to
have been brought into chaotic existence by Horace Walpole’s bizarre
narrative The Castle of Otranto (1764), also seems to have been quite
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closely linked to the decline of the bourgeois public sphere that Habermas
outlines. The rage for what were termed ‘terror novels’ by the 1790s was
denounced in the critical journals of the period as a danger to the rational
and moral probity of their predominantly female readers. ‘The female mind
is more readily affected,’ one commentator warned. ‘They return with
palled senses, to the world’s concerns, after revelling in the luxurious and
voluptuous descriptions, which appear in the pages of a novel – scenes on
which their readers’ enraptured fancy is ever found to dwell with inexpress-
ible delight.’20 Using a model of mimetic contagion, it was assumed that
what was read would induce in the reading public the exorbitant emotions
typical of Gothic romances with their wild landscapes, eerie confined spaces
and buried secrets, and thus damage rational and ethical behaviour in both
private and public spheres.
Otranto was initially received as a singular oddity. It is passed off as a
medieval document from superstitious Catholic Italy that records, in
abrupt, disordered passages, a series of supernatural interventions into the
castle of Manfred. The castle’s dungeons, labyrinths and twisting corridors
all operate as symbols of his feudal tyranny. As Manfred desperately plots to
secure a male heir to inherit his title by menacing a variety of damsels,
spectres float, ancestral portraits sigh and depart their frames dejectedly,
and gigantic pieces of armour appear in weirdly severed bits – a helmet here,
a sword there. A vast nemesis is being assembled that will eventually burst
the bounds of the castle and bring it and Manfred to ruin. Manfred’s
usurpation of rightful inheritance is exposed and order is benignly restored
and divinely re-confirmed. This odd hybrid book is an experiment in a
systematic derangement of the senses and a deliberate refusal of an emerg-
ent demand for realist representation. Walpole complained, in the preface to
Otranto, that in fiction ‘the great resources of fancy have been dammed
up, by a strict adherence to common life’.21 Walpole took the kernel of the
tale from a nightmare, and the book has a dream-like quality that revels in
weird juxtapositions and excesses of sensibility. Otranto has therefore often
invited psychoanalytical interpretations that can then be scaled up to
loosely render the Gothic as the unconscious of the Enlightenment, a return
of the repressed that will shadow the exercise of reason. The Gothic, one
might say, is the underside of modernity, its persecutory double or secret
sharer. Wherever Victor Frankenstein is, there his monster shall also be.
This position gives the Gothic an alluring sheen of sexy subversion, but
risks reinforcing the place of the genre outside the public sphere, regarding it
purely as an irrational irruption of the dark forces of the id. Yet on a more
historically informed reading, Otranto can be understood as profoundly
engaged with the political and public spheres of its time. Horace Walpole
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was a Whig politician, a reformer concerned with holding off any return of
excessive aristocratic or kingly exercises of power over parliament. In 1764,
for example, when he was an MP for King’s Lynn, Walpole attacked the use
of a general warrant to prosecute a friend for an alleged libel on King
George III. Such warrants were seen as arbitrary instruments of tyranny
that subverted the rule of parliamentary democracy. Walpole became
involved in a furious exchange of pamphlets on the case with William
Guthrie. This was not quite the exemplary exercise of public reason
Habermas might have imagined took place in the Enlightenment. After a
couple of exchanges, Guthrie simply resorted to calling Walpole a ‘her-
maphroditic horse’ and claiming that Walpole’s defence was driven by an
‘unsuccessful passion’ for another man.22 The substance of this accusation
is unclear: Walpole’s sexuality and the relationships in his circle are not
easily determinable. But given that sodomy was a capital crime, it was not
only Walpole’s reputation that was under attack: it was his very being.
Walpole chose to retreat from public life as political enemies circled,
returning to his house, the eccentric Gothic fantasia he had built at Straw-
berry Hill. It was in this context that Walpole had his Gothic nightmare, the
kernel for Otranto. In one sense, then, Walpole’s innovative novelistic
fusion of the old romance and the new novel offers itself as an allegory
about a fear of regression to pre-Enlightened structures of tyranny, where
the democracy, the rule of law and the ‘public’ is dissolved through the
arbitrary exercise of feudal power. The Gothic, as Chris Baldick suggests, is
often about fears of ‘historical reversion; that is, of the nagging possibility
that the despotisms buried by the modern age may yet prove to be
undead’.23 Otranto engages, in other words, in a reflection on the very
nature and fragile existence of the bourgeois public sphere, through one of
its principal constitutive vehicles: the novel. That Otranto is such a hybrid,
awkward and disordered novel might also be because Walpole is experi-
encing a tension between public values and private desires, at the limits of
what is permissible in the public sphere of the 1760s. As George Haggerty
has noted, from Walpole’s inaugural text onwards, the Gothic has often had
an atmosphere of camp or ‘queer’ sensibility because it has been an ambiva-
lent means to explore desires ‘which violate the terms of conventional social
intercourse and defy the confines of novelistic expression’.24
The first wave of the Gothic, up to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818),
therefore establishes the potential of the genre to work in multiple, contra-
dictory ways in relation to the allegedly rational political discourse of the
public sphere. Gothic texts undoubtedly explore the mind unhinged through
their insistent fascination with sublimity, horror and the extreme passions.
Yet it also provides the apparatus to engage politically within the public
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sphere. Anne Radcliffe’s oddly self-cancelling project in her novels of the

1790s is to generate supernatural terrors that are ultimately defused by
natural explanation: her readers are therefore returned to the world with
a robust reason, appropriate sensibility and an ethical training. Her ‘terror’
novels are intended to generate responsible members of a reading public or
wider public sphere. In Frankenstein, however, Victor Frankenstein’s thor-
oughly materialist experiments into the electrical spark of life are associated
with the radical worlds of atheism, secular science and revolutionary poli-
tics circulating in a deeply paranoid, post-Revolutionary era.25 Shelley
never invokes a supernatural or spiritual realm: the sublime continually
falls back into a social world that is no longer divinely sanctioned but
which can be potentially utterly transformed by technoscience. The being
Frankenstein creates is given an education in history through the incendiary
radical text The Ruins of Empire by Constantin Volney, and is thus able to
reflect eloquently on injustice and the social construction of monstrosity.
The conservative moralising about Faustian overreaching never quite
contains the revolutionary energies of the novel, and if the novel finishes
open-endedly in the Arctic wastes, it may be because those political passions
are not (yet) thinkable within the bourgeois public sphere.
The Gothic thus comes into being in the eighteenth century as a discourse that
is able to act as a displaced form of critical commentary, a place from which
both a public and a counterpublic discourse might be simultaneously engin-
eered, often within the same text. As many critics have noted, the transgressions
of Gothic fiction both breach boundaries but also work to re-contain the very
energies it unleashes.26 In the Gothic, conservative and radical impulses, public
and counterpublic energies, are often coiled one within the other.
Michael Warner argues that ‘a public enables a reflexivity in the circulation
of texts among strangers who become, by virtue of their reflexively circulating
discourse, a social entity’.27 Yet his conception of the bourgeois public sphere is
not one of consensus and inclusivity. By its nature, it must have a logic of
exclusion and domination, therefore fostering the emergence of counterpublics
and dissident textualities. Intriguingly, Warner’s explicit discussion of the
‘mass public’ in the contemporary era concentrates on the fascination of mass
culture with spectacles of disaster, ‘popular because it is a way of making mass
subjectivity available’, making an abstract general public concrete by concen-
trating it in the wounded or injured body.28 This is what Mark Seltzer has
termed the pathological public sphere, in which, in a sardonic revision of
Habermas, ‘the opening toward others is drawn to the collective spectacle of
torn and open bodies’.29 If mass culture frequently addresses the ‘disincorpora-
tion’ at the heart of the public sphere, the body horror of the Gothic surely
becomes a crucial cultural form of this re-embodiment.
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Let’s bring ourselves up to date with a reflection on contemporary horror,

considering the zombie apocalypses that have been repeatedly unleashed
since George Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (1968) reinvented the
zombie, turning a nineteenth-century word of African origin that had been
used to describe an animated but soulless corpse, into a new kind of mass
subject.
The structural zombification of the public sphere

Romero’s iconic film appeared in the incendiary year when the American
public sphere was collapsing under revolutionary tensions, riots, murders
and assassinations.30 The vision of the massed walking dead, closing in on
the last human survivors, has been massively influential not just in film, but
on the entire direction of late twentieth-century literature and culture.
Indeed, one recent survey of the field was subtitled How the Living Dead
Devoured Pop Culture.31 One of Romero’s principal sources was Richard
Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), a science fiction novel that inverted the
tradition of the lone Gothic monster, instead focusing on the last human
survivor trying to discover a cure for the plague that had transformed
human society into a baying mass of the undead. Matheson’s novel, first
filmed as The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona, 1964) and then by
Romero, provided potent metaphors of the structural zombification of the
public sphere, and this trope has since slipped fluidly between popular
forms, from horror novels, comics, cinema and even high concept main-
stream TV series such as The Walking Dead.
The repeated scene in post-Romero zombie fictions is of engulfment: one
of the last human survivors succumbs to the pressing mass of grasping hands
and sinks from view, to be instantly devoured by a frenzied crowd. At least
once in a text, it seems, a body must be witnessed being wrenched apart and
opened out, intestines dragged from torsos and fought over by ghouls as if
to incarnate fully this extinction of individual subjectivity. This is a bodily
marking out of the mass subject, there precisely to signal the horrifying and
disintegrative process of massification. The grimmest, most relentless por-
trait of this physical opening up of bodies into the mass does not depend on
the frenzy of the visible that cinema provides: it is actually a highly wrought
novel, Conrad Williams’s The Unblemished (2007), in which London suc-
cumbs to self-immolation, lovingly described in lengthy paragraphs of
hypnotic prose.
Zombie fictions are for many the lowest, most abject form of popular
culture, the undead themselves representing, for one critic, ‘the creative
slavery of mass culture’.32 The mirror of text and consumer is perfect: such
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impoverished cultural gratification leaves an unsatisfied hunger that

prompts insatiable zombified consumption of brain-dead low culture.
Once, the zombie was a slave of an individual sorcerer, literalising the
dead labour of production. The belief is African, but flowered in the Haitian
slave-plantations. It entered modern American culture at the end of the US
occupation of Haiti in the early 1930s, where ‘voodoo’ held sway over the
imagination of both coloniser and colonised. The vector of contagion was
Jeremy Seabrook’s fanciful book, The Magic Island (1929), which claimed
anthropological authority for participation in alleged voodoo rites and a
glimpse of the ‘undead’ workers in the cane fields. Mesmeric control by the
master was considered one explanation: zombie accounts, such as the film
White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932), retained a dreamy, feverish exoti-
cism, familiar from Gothic nightmares of the past.
After Matheson and Romero, though, the zombie is no longer a pre-
modern figure of slave production, but one of insatiable mass consumption,
always seen in clamouring crowds, symbols that ‘the public realm is being
invaded by pure necessity, or pure consumption’.33 These are not the
individualised, ennobled undead – aristocratic vampires or royal mummies –
but the anonymous, stupid, shuffling masses, marked by ‘numbness or
volitionless vacancy’.34 Now zombie plagues spread instantly, exponen-
tially, globally. Such hunger recognises no familial or ethical taboos: zombie
kids always devour their mothers. The zombies stumbling vaguely through
the shopping mall of The Dawn of the Dead (1977) are in fact wonderfully
emblematic of Habermas’s most apocalyptic fears about the threats to the
public sphere, the ‘lifeworld pathologies’ or ‘damaged intersubjectivity’ that
he suggests result from intrusions of the state and economic systems.35 The
glut of twenty-first-century zombie culture ups the ante even further. In
novels like World War Z or The Strain, the vectors of globalisation turn late
capitalist society into a catastrophe. Zombiedom is a disease that exploits
every seam of routes of travel, trade and illegal trafficking.36 The inter-
nationalisation of the threat therefore marks the final destruction of the
public sphere, its structural zombification. The zombies are us, the masses.
Zombies are the ‘herd’ invoked by Q. D. Leavis, public tastes reaching their
ultimate debasement. But as Steven Shaviro has wittily observed, zombies
are often not allegorical at all, they simply are the deadly social results of the
inner logic of capitalism.37
In Romero’s hands, the zombie is a satire on unreflective views about
popular culture and the fate of the public sphere. His films use the low
cultural energies of the Gothic to develop a counterpublic critique of social
injustice and contemporary consumer society. David Pagano suggests that
Romero’s vision fits a certain eschatological mode which posits ‘an
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irredeemably corrupt world, a world so oppressive or evil that only the

absolute annihilation of apocalypse can put an end to it’.38 Apocalyptic
horror often adopts the exorbitant rhetoric of what John Clute calls vasta-
tion, a revelation of a truth that is also ‘a laying waste to a land or a psyche’
that begins to take on global or even cosmic proportions.39 Romero’s
zombie films thus progressively target different logics of domination, using
the shambolic apparatus of the zombie to put the critique into the form of a
story, always gleefully ramping it up to apocalyptic levels.
The tight focus of Night of the Living Dead implies a local outbreak of
reanimated corpses that is put down by redneck militias delighted to revive
the tradition of slave lynching parties. Sardonically, the one human survivor
of the zombie assault on the farmhouse is shot down by his rescuers because
he is black (the closing credits that include still photographs of the body
removed by meat hook and displayed as a trophy are an explicit echo of
lynching mementos). Dawn of the Dead, set in the world’s first indoor
shopping mall in suburban America, contains its own explicit commentary
on consumption and the murderous exclusionary logic of this commercial
utopia (the mall is cleansed of its zombies just as earlier the poor ethnic
populations of urban housing projects are cleansed by military extermi-
nation). Strikingly, the film begins with a sustained representation of a
highly disputatious public sphere, a television studio barely capable of
sustaining order in front of or behind the camera, as contradictory theories,
competing information, and different political and religious agendas about
the escalating zombie plague are fought out. Romero always offers a tiny
band of human survivors who establish a temporary zone of safety. This might
seem to affirm the individual above the abjected mass, except that the film
ensures explicit parallels between zombie and human behaviour, and ends (as
they all do) with zombies overrunning and devouring any New Jerusalem that
the survivors might have set up. In Day of the Dead (1985), New Jerusalem is
reduced to a military bunker and authoritarian rule anyway.
By Land of the Dead (2005), a late renewal of the series by Romero, the
sympathies seemed reversed. The zombies appear to be acquiring a rudi-
mentary political intelligence, grasp the nature of their servitude, and target
their exploitative human masters. The iconography of the film resonates
uncannily with the Katrina disaster in New Orleans that took place in the
year of the film’s release, hordes of dispossessed zombies wading through
swamp waters towards the human zone of privilege above the flood plain.
This immediate context invested the film with a punchy contemporaneity, as
a commentary on the Republican administration’s indifference to the fate of
the poor black populations. It is also a significant return to the roots of the
zombie in the context of slavery, figuring zombies as ‘proletarian pariahs
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[who] make visible a phantom history’.40 Far from being the apocalyptic
end of the public sphere, it is the zombies that seem to promise the
alternative.
This is the development picked up in one of the more striking revisionist
zombie novels, Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies. Giving the focalising con-
sciousness of the narrative to a zombie is a significant move (It begins: ‘I
am dead, but it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with it.’41). What this
opening promises is a transformation of the ceaseless war of zombie and
human enclaves into a future that promises a revivified public sphere if
hybrid identities, somewhere between living and undead, can come to be
accepted. At a meta-critical level, then, the zombie fictions need not embody
brain-dead mass cultural entertainment, but can also use the counterpublic
discourses built into the history of the Gothic genre to contribute actively to
disputes within the public sphere about the survival of human lifeworlds in
an increasingly globalised system.
Of course, as Robin Wood long ago observed, any progressive elements of
horror are never far from tipping over into reactionary or punitive forms.42
Romero seems to have retained a commitment to counterpublic critical
engagement through the trope of the zombie up to the current iterations
of his open-ended series. In other versions of the zombie narrative, however,
zombies can become merely a celebration of abjected spectacle. Is the
remake of Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004) a symbol of the system’s
appropriation of Romero’s counterpublic discourse? Zombieland (Ruben
Fleischer, 2009) seems to be a concerted exercise in containment, a light
comic vision of a post-apocalyptic America that precisely reduces zombies
to the hateful masses and unreflectively reasserts the triumph of the individ-
ual, allowing its small band of survivors, perhaps uniquely, to live through
the culminating zombie onslaught unscathed.
Lying somewhere between critique and conservative retrenchment is
Stephen King’s novel, Cell (2006), which explores the mass zombie trope
(the book is dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero). Cell
exploits all the conventions of the sudden catastrophic breakdown of
American society into murderous rage, not by the undead but by the brain-
wiped. King’s ragged band of survivors soon grasp that a pulse has been sent
through cell phones – that near ubiquitous digital network – and the overt
moralising message of the novel seems only to warn that the fragility of the
lifeworld or public sphere has been destroyed by being almost entirely
swallowed by technological systems. Cell might be plausibly regarded as a
populist account of Habermas’s suspicion of new electronic social networks.
This animus against mobile technology seems of a piece with King’s con-
servative humanism in other respects. More interesting, however, is King’s
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development of the ‘zombie’ masses in the latter stages of the book: they
develop a group intelligence, ‘flocking’ and ‘roosting’ in vast numbers, and
begin to develop telepathic and telekinetic powers, possibly as unforeseen
glitches in their brain-wiped re-programming. King is unfortunate in choosing
a black man as the embodiment of this mass: ideas of hive minds, brainwashing
and the collectivist destruction of the individual have a long history in racist
conspiracies about the (usually Asiatic) hordes threatening the American
public sphere. Yet here, at least, is a development in exploring the post-human
subjectivity of the zombie state in terms which might hint at something other
than complete abjection. By the end, Clay, our hero, must accommodate
himself to a zombified son and the risk of another re-boot.
But counterpublic critique has not been entirely drained from the zombie
trope. In the Canadian film Pontypool (Bruce MacDonald, 2008), the
zombie virus is a linguistic illness, something communicated within the
banalities of public discourse. The film is based on Tony Burgess’s elliptical
novel, Pontypool Changes Everything, which explains: ‘Once infected, the
victim produces the virus in the language he or she struggles with . . . The
victim becomes frantic, rebelling against the onset of the disease by wilfully
destroying, ahead of the virus, his or her own normative behaviour. It is a
desperate attempt to escape . . . Strangers’ mouths are the escape route
through which the victim attempts to disappear, in a violent and bloody
fashion.’43 In the filmed version, the action is restricted to a public radio
station, where the massacres unfold through news reports and the jaded DJ
must learn to reinvent language, avoid empty cliché, and do active damage
to the degraded currency of talk radio in order to arrest or cure any incipient
signs of zombie aphasia. The linguistic colonialism of America’s encroach-
ment on Canada is an explicit element of this unfolding apocalypse (the
virus is only carried in American English). Burgess’s novel and MacDonald’s
film seem curiously attuned to debates that have followed in the wake of
Habermas’s conceptions of the public sphere and whether there remains,
within the channels of communicative rationality, a utopian strand that
might resist total domination of lifeworld by system.
With Romero’s work and MacDonald’s Pontypool, there is a surely a
sense that routinely denigrated forms of popular culture nevertheless con-
stitute a very active part of a public sphere, using a trope of the brain-dead
masses to reflect critically on the depredations of publicness. They launch,
in fact, a counterpublic critique of systemic disruptions that shows that
disputation and debate continues to survive in the very grain of popular
culture. What this Gothic channel also communicates is the limits of
Habermas’s restrictive conception of communicative rationality for the
public sphere. His universalistic model for communication to be rational,
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non-coercive, valid and transparent is of course an ideal. Literature, as

Steven Connor observes, is ultimately suspected by Habermas because
‘literary discourse permits and promotes the analytic appraisal of the very
distinction between valid and invalid discourse’.44 The Gothic in all its
forms equally explores a murkier situation than Habermas allows, reason
pressured by interior and exterior powers over which it has minimal under-
standing or control. In staging these conflicts, Gothic forms speak more
dynamically and with more insight about the fate of the public sphere than
Habermas suggests. Popular fiction is not a symptom of the decline of the
public sphere. It is, rather, one of the most vibrant places to find arguments
about the nature and limits of the public.
NOTES
1 Dwight MacDonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’, in Mass Culture: The Popular

Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David White Manning (New York:
Free Press, 1957), pp. 63–4.
2 Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of
Captain Charles Ryder (1945) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 134.
3 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life, with
Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (London: Chatto, 1957),
p. 205.
4 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception’, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
(1944) (London: Verso, 1979).
5 J. Habermas, ‘Modernity – An Unfinished Project’, in Postmodernist Culture, ed.
Hal Foster (London: Pluto, 1985), pp. 3–16.
6 For the attack on Derrida and Foucault, see J. Habermas, The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
Derrida’s passing, wounded response was embedded in a footnote in Limited
Inc., trans. S. Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 156–8.
The end of metanarratives was a stance formulated by Jean-François Lyotard
in The Postmodern Condition, trans. G. Bennington (University of Manchester
Press, 1984).
7 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge: Polity, 1989),
pp. 25–6. Future references will appear in the text.
8 For a synthetic portrait of this era in full sympathy with this ‘conviviality’, see
Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
(London: Penguin, 2000).
9 See Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique
of Actually Existing Democracy’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig
Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 109–42.
10 See J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action II: Lifeworld and
System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy (Cambridge:
Polity, 1987), p. 390.
83
roger luckhurst
11 See Alexander Kruge and Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and Richard Gilman-
Opalsky, Unbounded Publics: Transgressive Public Spheres, Zapatismo, and
Political Theory (Lanham, ML: Lexington, 2008).
12 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005),
p. 63. Nancy Fraser, ‘Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere: Toward a
Postmodern Conception’, in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics,
ed. L. Nicholson and S. Seidman (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 291.
13 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London:
Fontana, 1983), p. 237.
14 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto, 1932), p. 132.
15 Ibid., p. 136.
16 Ibid., p. 156.
17 See Lisa Rodensky, ‘Popular Dickens’, Victorian Literature and Culture 37
(2009): 583–607 and Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination
(Cambridge University Press, 2007).
18 Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, pp. 187 and 185.
19 Stefan Collini, Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (Oxford University
Press, 2009).
20 W. W., ‘On Novels and Romances’ (1802), in Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook
1700–1820, ed. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (Manchester University Press,
2000), p. 212.
21 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. E. J. Clery (Oxford University Press,
1996), p. 9.
22 For details, see Paul Langford, ‘Horatio [Horace] Walpole’, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography (2004–9), www.oxford.dnb.com
23 Chris Baldick, ‘Introduction’, Gothic Tales (Oxford University Press, 1992),
p. xxi.
24 George E. Haggerty, ‘Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth
Century: Walpole, Beckford and Lewis’, Studies in the Novel 18 (1986): 350.
25 See Iwan Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition and Experi-
ment in Early Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton University Press, 1998).
26 See Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996).
27 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, pp. 11–12.
28 Ibid., p. 177.
29 Mark Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: The Pathological Public Sphere’, October 80
(1997): 9.
30 For the best introduction to the historical context of Romero’s film, see Ben
Hervey, Night of the Living Dead (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2008).
31 David Flint, Zombie Holocaust: How the Living Dead Devoured Pop Culture
(London: Plexus, 2009).
32 Markman Ellis, A History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2000),
p. 239.
33 Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, ‘A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman
Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism’, Boundary 2: 35 (2008): 100.
34 Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the
Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 357.
35 Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action II, p. 390.
84
36 Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (London:
Duckworth, 2006) and Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro, The Strain
(London: HarperCollins, 2009). The latter concerns a vampire plague.
37 See the chapter on Romero’s cinema in Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
38 David Pagano, ‘The Space of Apocalypse in Zombie Cinema’, in Zombie Cul-
ture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, ed. S. McIntosh and M. Leverette (Lanham:
Scarecrow Press, 2008), p. 74.
39 John Clute, The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror (Cauheegan:
Payseur and Schmidt, 2006), p. 148.
40 Jean and John Comaroff, ‘Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial
Capitalism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (2002): 783.
41 Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 3.
42 See Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986, which reads Romero as part of an incoherently progres-
sive horror movement in the 1970s, largely contained by the 1980s.
43 Tony Burgess, Pontypool Changes Everything (Toronto: ECW Press, 2009),
p. 158.
44 Steven Connor, ‘Ethics of Discourse: Habermas, Lyotard and Rorty’, in Theory
and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 126–7.
85
5
NICOLA HUMBLE
The reader of popular fiction
Writing in 1936 of his memories of working in a second-hand-bookshop-

cum-lending-library, George Orwell painted a horrified pen portrait of a
typical reader of popular fiction:
He read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others
which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he
never read the same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent
of trash (the pages read each year would, I calculated, cover nearly three-
quarters of an acre) was stored for ever in his memory. He took no notice of
titles or authors’ names, but he could tell merely by glancing into a book
whether he had ‘had it already’.1
Undiscriminating, without judgement, a passive consumer gulping down

rubbish by the gallon: this is the reader of popular fiction as we most often
see him (or, more usually, her) in the accounts of concerned commentators
down the centuries. From anxieties about the salacious reading of early
modern apprentices to imprecations against the novel-reading habits of
Victorian middle-class girls, popular reading is repeatedly rendered through
tropes of danger, passivity and lack of control. The reader is imagined as
solitary, obsessed, his or her engagement with texts virtually masturbatory
in the intensity of its self-pleasuring. But an examination of the lived experi-
ences of what I shall call popular readers demonstrates something rather
different: a more subtle, nuanced, critical engagement with texts – and one
that is surprisingly often not solitary at all, but located within an active
community of readers. A growing body of critical work has begun, in the
last few decades, to engage with such reading communities and bring their
practices to light. One of the most influential texts was that of Janice
Radway, whose Reading the Romance (1987), a pioneering study of the
readers of popular romantic fiction, initiated what has come to be known as
an ethnography of reading.2 An ethnographic approach draws on the tools of
anthropology and sociology to consider the ways in which reading operates
86
on a social and cultural level, establishing communities and influencing

behaviours and values. Reading ethnographers tend to examine specific
reading communities closely, employing the fieldwork techniques of the
anthropologist as much as the archive-based methods of the historian.
So Radway examined groups of women who defined themselves primarily
as wives and mothers, to consider how their reading of romantic fiction
impacted on their sense of themselves and their relationships, finding her-
self, as her research progressed, focusing most particularly on the signifi-
cance of the act of romance reading, rather than the particulars of individual
romances. Her findings contributed considerably to the sophistication of
critical understanding of romance readers, challenging the long-standing
view that saw such readers, more than all others, as passive and unreflecting
in their literary consumption. As well as interviews and personal immersion
in communities, the evidential sources available to the reading ethnographer
are the records and traces left behind by readers: the scrawled notes in the
margins of texts, the records of subscribers of lending libraries, individual
book collections, diaries and letters, as well as the cruder evidence of
publishers’ sales figures and adoption by national book clubs and guilds
(crude because the purchase of a book by no means guarantees the reading
of it – think of the case of Stephen Hawking’s bestselling but notoriously
unread A Brief History of Time). Oddly, the reading experience which is
hardest to trace is that which our culture has long considered most norma-
tive: that of the solitary silent reader, whose image is repeatedly enshrined
in image and print.
Reading communities and institutions

So what is a reading community? Many models spring to mind: the conclave
of the religious, debating scriptural or doctrinal intricacies; the university
seminar group; the internet fan group dissecting the latest episode of ‘their’
show. And, of course, the reading group, a phenomenon that has always
been with us, but which has attained great cultural prominence and cur-
rency of late. There is a strong sense in which experiencing stories in groups
is actually more primal, more ‘natural’ than reading alone: think of the tribe
gathering around the storyteller, the bedtime stories read by parents. The
idea of reading as ideally something communal survives for a very long
time: the image of the family huddled around the hearth listening to the next
episode of an exciting story was a key component in the Victorian bourgeois
fantasy of the ideal home. Even the reading group proper – the organised
regular meeting of non-family members to share their reading or recount
their reading experiences – has a much longer history than we might
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assume. Historians have uncovered evidence of groups of rural women in

sixteenth-century France gathering in the evenings to read Le Roman de la
Rose; groups of artisans meeting to read together was a common phenom-
enon in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, when such groups were often
the focal point for radical activity; and the reading group, more generally,
was often a replacement for more formal education, such as in the case of
the female mill operatives in the late 1840s who met at five o’clock in the
morning to read Shakespeare together for an hour before work.3 In the
twentieth century, reading communities become more structured phenom-
ena, much larger, more influential and increasingly commercialised. Read-
ing begins to be organised by a series of institutions, which create their own
reading communities with their own sets of expectations about books and
their relationship to them.4
Some of the most powerful were the various book societies which sprang
up in the years following the First World War. The first, whose model was
imitated by all the rest, was the American Book-of-the-Month Club, which
was founded in 1926; in Britain it was joined the following year by the Book
Society and in 1930 by the Book Guild. These clubs offered newly published
books at a hugely discounted rate and so made regular book-buying a
possibility for whole new sectors of the population (books priced by their
publishers at up to 12s 6d would be offered by book clubs for 2s 6d). The
chosen book of the month would be dispatched to all members, who had the
opportunity to return it in exchange for one of the other books on the list if
preferred. With a guaranteed mass readership, the book clubs could dictate
terms to publishers and authors alike. Dodie Smith was dismayed when the
American Literary Guild ordered 550,000 copies of I Capture the Castle
(1949) on the condition that she made specific changes to the text: ‘I see
how dangerous to the integrity of the author these book clubs are,’ she
wrote in her journal.5 With an effect on sales and status rather like that of
the Booker and other prizes in our own day, the book club selection
committees sought to confer ‘modern classic’ status on the contemporary
fiction of the day, decking out their books in ‘dignified’ uniform bindings
and employing in their publicity material a language designed to evoke a life
of cultured gentility – ‘splendid books’, ‘a first-class library’.6
Another highly influential type of reading institution in the early twentieth
century was the lending library. After the First World War there was a very rapid
expansion in the number of private lending libraries, so that quite soon there
was a W. H. Smiths or Boots Booklovers’ Library in every fair-sized town.
Public lending libraries also expanded dramatically in this period, as did the
‘twopenny libraries’ run from tobacconists and newsagents: these latter being
used fairly exclusively by members of the working classes, while the middle
88
classes patronised the more exclusive subscription libraries. The extremely

successful Boots libraries were originally set up as loss-leaders, designed to
attract middle-class customers to the pharmacies. Their success can be meas-
ured in the extent to which they become iconic in the period: Laura Jesson,
the totemically middle-class heroine of the film Brief Encounter has just been
to change her library books at Boots before her transformative encounter on the
station platform, while John Betjeman’s ‘In Westminster Abbey’ presents the
Boots library as a key signifier of a comfortable bourgeois existence:
Think of what our Nation stand for,

Books from Boots, and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.7
The private subscribing libraries were highly controlling affairs, with sub-
scribers divided into classes according to the price of their membership,
with different choices accorded to each. In the case of Boots the most
expensive ‘On Demand’ subscription allowed the borrower to borrow any
book in circulation in the library as a whole. ‘Class A’ subscribers had a
claim to any book in circulation, but might have to wait for the newer more
popular ones, while the ‘class B’ subscriber typically had to wait six months
to read newly published books. Librarians were trained to offer books they
felt that individual readers would like, and contemporary accounts of the
lending library suggest that individual librarians often exercised a tyrannical
control over the reading of their hapless customers.
Both book clubs and lending libraries shaped and organised the mass of
contemporary fiction in distinctive ways. In intriguing counterpoint to the
models of literary categorisation being formulated within universities and
the critical establishment, the training materials provided for librarians
categorised fiction according to the type of subscriber who might favour
each sort. The First Literary Course produced by Boots for its librarians
divided fiction into categories such as Light Romance, Family Stories and
Detective Fiction, advising that Light Romance is suitable for women who
‘say that they like a “pretty book” ’ and Family Stories ‘for those tired of
romance . . . seeking . . . “a well-written book” ’.8 And the Readers Union, a
book club that cannily marketed themselves as a union of readers against
the commercial might of publishers, trumpeted, in a publication celebrating
their twenty-first anniversary, their democratising influence on both access
to literature and definitions of literary value:
Perhaps it is as well to admit here that RU [Readers Union] has never seen
literature in the context, the rather Victorian context, of the fashionable novel,
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poetry, belles-lettres. We run a book club, not a literary club, for books are as
large as life and life is larger than lit . . . RU has always tried to reconcile the
vulgar and the recondite, and has cherished the hope of a popular culture.9
Simultaneously commercial and democratic, reading institutions created

and shaped various cultures of popular reading across the century. We might
think also of the profound impact of Penguin Books, founded by Allen Lane
in 1935, with the aim of making a paperback book as affordable as a packet
of cigarettes, or of the Reader’s Digest, with its extracts from contemporary
publications and long-running series of condensed versions of classic texts.
Moving closer to the present, there is the case of the book group, which
having jogged along unassumingly for centuries suddenly in the 1990s
became a phenomenon, a craze reported on in the press, lampooned in
cartoons, and featured in soap operas. Book shops began to offer guidance
notes for book groups, with many hosting informal drop-in groups them-
selves; publishers began to print questions and themes for group discussion
at the back of their publications, and belonging to a book group became an
increasingly common practice. Part of that visibility is to do with the
adoption of the trend by the mass media. In 1996 talk-show host Oprah
Winfrey founded Oprah’s Book Club, in which every month a book is
chosen and then a month later half a show is devoted to discussing it. The
statistics are astounding: 10,000 letters each month from eager participants;
500,000 viewers reading at least part of the book before the discussion
episode, with nearly as many people buying the book in the following
weeks. Many of the books featured become bestsellers and their authors
millionaires.10 In Britain, Richard and Judy, hosts of daytime magazine
show This Morning, followed suit with their own highly successful book
club. The books promoted by Oprah’s and other mass-media book clubs are
clearly popular, but not necessarily books that would have attained popu-
larity without their intervention. The books chosen by book clubs in general
do not map as neatly as we might expect onto the list of bestsellers of the
moment. Book clubs by definition require books with enough ‘meat’ for
discussion, which leads them to tend to reject the more ‘lightweight’ bestsel-
ling books, rejecting on the whole crime fiction, romance and other forms of
genre fiction and instead selecting what publishers tend to list as ‘literary
fiction’.11 Book groups are less subordinate to the literary academy than we
might expect (or perhaps only literary academics might expect this), with
most book groups confidently inscribing their own categories of taste and
reading judgement independently from and often in opposition to those of
university English departments and literary critics: ‘many of the readers
have a strong sense of cultural entitlement that derives from their own
90
position of educational and social privilege, so that they can eschew with
ease the pronouncements of the academy, which is to them just another
fraction of the sociocultural elite’.12 Book groups, like all such reading
institutions, raise a series of complex questions about issues of popular
taste, intellectual snobbery, and the pleasures and purposes of reading. In
order to further explore these issues I will consider two apparently very
different types of reading communities in more detail: the middlebrow
reading culture of the interwar years and the internet fan fiction that has
emerged in the last decade.
Middlebrow readers between the wars

A great deal of cultural capital was at stake in the interwar years in the
identification of particular classes of reader. The highbrow was a self-
proclaimed creature, a member of the intellectual class made up of writers,
critics, academics and literary publishers, who saw himself as under siege,
resisting the onslaughts of an increasingly consumerist mass culture. Read-
ing for highbrows such as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and Q. D. Leavis was
properly effortful intellectual work and they despised the development of a
thriving market in escapist and entertaining reading matter. The literature of
which the highbrow appointed himself guardian was under threat from the
clearly lowbrow – radio, the cinema, pulp fiction and magazines – but also
from the incursions made by the middlebrow onto the hallowed ground of
literary taste and value. While the highbrow reader was self-identified, the
middlebrow reader – like middlebrow texts – was much less likely to
embrace the label wholeheartedly. Instead he was identified and vigorously
pursued by those reading institutions discussed earlier, and by writers,
publishers and newspapers editors. The middlebrow as a cultural phenom-
enon is characterised precisely by its commodification – its profound flexi-
bility in the face of the changing demands of the market. It is this feature
that its highbrow critics most condemned – but it is also the reason that they
consistently underestimated it. Immediately responsive to shifts in public
tastes, almost paranoically aware of the latest trends – both popular and
intellectual – the middlebrow was able to constantly reinvent itself, incorp-
orating highbrow experimentation, language and attitudes almost as soon
as they were formulated, and combining them with a mass accessibility and
pleasurable appeal. The middlebrow, as Janice Radway astutely observed,
commodified ‘not only particular books, but the whole concept of Culture
itself’.13 And like the literature, middlebrow reading practices were more
subtle and more complex than one might assume. Time and again middle-
brow novels require of their reader a sort of double vision: they demand to
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be taken seriously at precisely the same time as they wryly mock themselves
and the world they depict. E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels are one
example, with their exuberantly surrealistic take on the minutiae of domes-
tic experience (where exclusion from dinner parties leads to revenge schemes
as elaborate as those of Jacobean drama, and the theft of a recipe leads to the
protagonists being washed out to sea on an upturned kitchen table): they
work by treating with profound affection the thing they are so clearly
revealing as ridiculous. Or there is the ending of Nancy Mitford’s The
Pursuit of Love (1945), which offers us high romance (the death of Linda
in childbirth; the death of her true love in war), only to simultaneously snatch
it away by giving the last word to the cynical Bolter:
‘But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,’ I said.
‘He was the great love of her life, you know.’
‘Oh, dulling,’ said my mother, sadly. ‘One always thinks that.
Every, every time.’14
A considerable part of the pleasure afforded by the interwar middlebrow,

I would suggest, is to be found precisely here: in the sophistication of
reading practices required of its readers as they switch effortlessly between
knowing and surrendered readings.
The concept of the middlebrow is a notoriously vexed one. ‘Middlebrow’
has always been a dirty word. Since its coinage in the late 1920s it has been
applied, almost always disparagingly, to the sort of cultural products
thought to be too easy, insular and smug. While the ‘lowbrow’ has been
taken seriously by literary and cultural critics since at least the 1970s, it is
only in the last decade that critics have begun to focus their attention on the
cultural place of the middlebrow and the relationship between the literature
and its readers.15 Already, within the community of scholars interested in
the topic of the middlebrow, there is much fruitful debate about exactly how
we categorise the concept and where precisely we draw the line between
low, high and middlebrow texts. My own position is that the middlebrow is
never a fixed category: that texts move in and out of its bounds according to
who was perceived to be reading them – so, selection as a ‘Book of the
Month’ by a newspaper would invariably push a book into the middlebrow
category, as, often, would ‘bestseller’ status. Some writers were extremely
sensitive about this process: Cyril Connolly tied himself in conceptual knots
trying to negotiate the problems of writing for a popular audience:
This, then, is the penalty of writing for the masses. As the writer goes out to
meet them half-way he is joined by other writers going out to meet them half-
way and they merge into the same creature – the talkie journalist, the adver-
tising, lecturing, popular novelist.
92
The process is complicated by the fact that the masses, whom a cultured
writer may generously write for, are at the moment overlapped by the middle-
class best-seller-making public and so a venal element is introduced.16
For Connolly, much as for the Marxist literary critics writing in the 1970s,
‘popular’ literature is acceptable only if ‘popular’ refers to the reading
matter of the working-class populace. To find oneself instead appealing
to bourgeois tastes is clearly mortifying to many a writer with literary
aspirations. A similar sensibility presumably motivated American author
Jonathan Franzen when in 2001 he became embroiled in a controversy with
Oprah Winfrey, when his novel The Corrections was selected for her book
club. Although initially willing to participate, Franzen later expressed his
doubts in a radio interview, leading Oprah’s team to rescind the invitation
to appear on the show. It seems that Franzen’s major concerns about
his selection involve what he saw as the likely effect on the gender of his
readers:
So much of reading is sustained in this country, I think, by the fact that women
read while men are off golfing or watching football on TV or playing with
their flight simulator or whatever. I worry – I’m sorry that it’s, uh – I had some
hope of actually reaching a male audience and I’ve heard more than one reader
in signing lines now at bookstores say ‘If I hadn’t heard you, I would have been
put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women.
I would never touch it.’ Those are male readers speaking. I see this as my book,
my creation.17
In his conflation of middlebrow status and a predominantly female reader-

ship, Franzen echoes precisely the anxieties and snobbery of the commen-
tators of the interwar years. According to George Orwell, the middlebrow
reader is almost invariably a woman; discussing arch-middlebrow novelist
Ethel M. Dell he comments with a startling burst of snobbish misogyny that
her novels are, ‘of course, read solely by women, but by women of all kinds
and ages, and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the
fat wives of tobacconists’.18 Though less colourful in her judgements,
Queenie Leavis, author of the pioneering 1932 study Fiction and the Read-
ing Public, also sees the spread of what she considers meretricious literature
as largely the fault of women, because ‘women rather than men change the
[library] books (that is, determine the family reading)’.19 Such perspectives
are far from isolated snobberies: throughout the interwar period and
beyond, I would contend, the middlebrow has been defined as a largely
feminine phenomenon. Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that
(as Franzen feared) a predominantly female readership very often automatically
consigned a text to the category of the middlebrow.
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The term ‘middlebrow’ continues to be one that embarrasses, because

it still has ideological power – notably the power to dismiss. Cultural
artifacts and by extension the people who enjoy and value them are
rendered littler, less serious, by the term. It has almost always been
deployed snobbishly, to devalue, in particular, the cultural products
embraced by the lower middle classes. The ideas of French cultural
theorist Pierre Bourdieu, author of Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste (1979), are of some relevance here. For Bourdieu,
lower-middle-class (‘petit-bourgeois’) culture is always only a pastiche
of what he calls ‘legitimate culture’, positioned in an eternally docile and
reverential relationship to it; it is essentially an anxious misreading of
high culture. Most strikingly, he suggests that middlebrow cultural
objects are illegitimate not because of any intrinsic aesthetic qualities
or lack, but simply because they are to the taste of the lower middle
class:
What makes the petit-bourgeois relation to culture and its capacity to make
‘middle-brow’ whatever it touches, just as the legitimate gaze ‘saves’ whatever
it lights upon, is not its ‘nature’ but the very position of the petit bourgeois in
social space, the social nature of the petit bourgeois, which is constantly
impressed on the petit bourgeois himself, determining his relation to legitimate
culture and his avid but anxious, naive but serious way of clutching at it. It is,
quite simply, the fact that legitimate culture is not made for him (and often
made against him), so that he is not made for it; and that it ceases to be what it
is as soon as he appropriates it.20
Bourdieu’s main project in Distinction is to expose the mechanisms

whereby taste operates as a form of social orientation, guiding members
of different ‘class fractions’ into appropriate social spaces and working to
exclude those from ‘lower’ fractions. The statement above may be an
accurate unpacking of the contempt felt by the gatekeepers of high culture,
but what it misses, it seems to me, is the extent to which, in the course of the
twentieth century, much popular culture defined itself not simply in opposi-
tion to the highbrow, but in spite of it. Even in the interwar years, a time of
heightened, powerfully felt inter-middle-class tensions and anxieties, the
tone and attitudes of the middlebrow are notably less abject than
Bourdieu’s account would suggest. It is certainly true that the middlebrow
fiction of the interwar years is keen to annex aspects of the high cultural –
the bohemian, the avant-garde, the experimental – but it does so almost
invariably with a tongue-in-cheek knowingness and a clear sense of superi-
ority. A good example is Agatha Christie’s The Hollow (1946), which
celebrates an unashamedly middlebrow paradise in the life of the family
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at its centre, who spend their time on crossword puzzles and round
games, and treat the effortful attitudes of the intellectual with an air of
gentle weary pity:
One wishes that they could put off being intellectual until they were rather
older. As it is, they always glower at one so and bite their nails and seem to
have so many spots and sometimes an Adam’s apple as well. And they either
won’t speak at all, or else are very loud and contradictory.21
But at the same time as mocking the highbrow, middlebrow novels repeat-
edly demonstrate a sophisticated awareness of it; so Christie’s characters
indulge in some scrupulously measured assessment of the avant-garde
sculptures of an acquaintance. Similarly, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle
both mocks the decades-long self-indulgent writer’s block of the Joycean
experimental novelist who is the father of the eccentric family at its heart,
and itself borrows the narrative open-endedness of the modernist for its
culminating inscription of the pain of unrequited love: ‘Only the margin left
to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.’22
Dodie Smith’s immensely popular novel requires of its reader that pre-
eminently middlebrow ‘double-think’ mentioned earlier: its self-consciously
writerly insistence on the materiality of text demands an active, thinking
reader, while its indulgence of the passionately self-centred, cynically
romantic feelings of its adolescent protagonist allows the reader to enjoy
cosy wallowings in emotions. Successful middlebrow texts skilfully manipu-
late these apparently contrasting narrative pleasures, walking a tightrope
between the overly emotional (lowbrow) and the entirely cerebral (high-
brow). Interestingly, it is often in their discussion of the pleasures of reading
that they engage intellectually with their readers. In Diana Tutton’s Guard
Your Daughters (1953) (now largely forgotten but in its day popular enough
to have been reissued by the Reprint Society), the Harvey sisters attempt to
entertain a supercilious guest by quizzing her about her experience of
reading: ‘If you are reading a novel . . . when it describes a house – hall,
drawing-room and so on – what do you see?’ The obtuse guest fails the test
hopelessly, declaring that she sees nothing but the book itself, but the novel’s
own reader is engaged by the question – invited to think about her own
reading experience and the ways in which she habitually inserts herself into
the narratives she consumes. Tutton’s novel makes strong narrative
demands, offering hints of a psychological puzzle beneath its frothy surface,
flattering the reader that she alone has seen that something more is going on
than the narrator admits, then dramatically turning the tables in the final
chapter. Like many middlebrow narratives it both expects and rewards
readerly sophistication and attention. A similar case is Rachel Ferguson’s
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The Brontës Went to Woolworths (1931), in which the reader is plunged

into the lives of the highly eccentric Carne family and left to work out for
herself that most of the friends and acquaintances they discuss are fantasy
figures, derived from their reading or based on people they have once seen.
The Carnes are such active, creative readers that they live mostly in their
heads: Deirdre, the narrator, explaining that she had once turned down an
engagement because she was in love with Sherlock Holmes, for whose
‘personality and brain [she] had a force of feeling which, for the time,
converted living men to shadows’.23 Central to the plot is their fantasy
about the Brontë sisters, who they jokingly imagine grappling with the
practicalities of twentieth-century life; when they begin to be actually
haunted by the sisters’ ghosts it becomes clear that fantasising has gone
too far, as the sanity of the youngest sister begins to crumble. In a text which
requires active skill of its readers, who have to repeatedly move between
realist and fantasy modes as the barriers between those generic categories
threaten to break down, there is at the same time an intense awareness of
the dangerously powerful pleasures of surrendered reading, of giving your-
self up utterly to the world of the book.
Fan fiction: reading as rewriting

Fan fiction is the activity of writing stories that carry on from an originating
text – a film, a TV show, or a book – and circulating those stories among a
community of like-minded fans. It is often assumed that fan fiction repre-
sents a similar surrender to textual pleasure, with fans unhealthily obsessed
by the world of the originating text, but a closer examination reveals that
this popular phenomenon is also characterised by a balance between active
and passive readings. The rewritings of texts indulged in by its proponents
are simultaneously self-indulgent realisations of narrative directions and
character developments not taken by the originating Ur-texts, and sophisti-
catedly knowing readings of those texts, their genre conventions and ideo-
logical preoccupations. Fan fiction is a gift for the reading ethnographer.
First, because it is writing about reading, and often accompanied by
thoughtful analyses (known as ‘metas’) of the reading experience. Secondly,
because of its active readerly mode, in which it literalises Roland Barthes’s
proposition that every reading is a rewriting. And then there is the issue
of volume: there is just so much of it – a vast, largely unexplored ocean of
stories and readers.
Fan fiction is highly cultish, its operations hazy or even invisible to those
outside its enclave. As an activity, it significantly predates the internet: science-
fiction fans exchanged fan fictions in the 1930s, and ‘fanzines’ – amateur
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publications circulated among groups of fans – were fairly common currency

among fans of Star Trek and similar cult shows in the 1960s and ’70s.24 But
fan fiction – and fan culture in general – has attained its apotheosis on the
internet in the last decade, with astonishing numbers of people involved.
Fanfiction.net, one of the most prolific sites, which hosts stories from a wide
range of fandoms, has at the time of writing (November 2009) well over a
million users. There are nearly nine hundred originating texts listed in the
book category (which sits alongside other sections on anime/manga, films,
plays and musicals, cartoons, comics, TV shows and video games). The texts
which generate fan fiction are very varied. Fanfiction.net has separate sections
for each of Jane Austen’s novels, Shakespeare has a respectable one and a half
thousand stories devoted to his works, and there are fandoms for Dickens,
Don Quixote and Beowulf. But by far the most popular is Harry Potter,
with a current 430,100 stories, trailed at 42,620 by The Lord of the Rings.
Particular types of texts seem to generate significant numbers of fan
fictional responses. One of the generative energies behind the writing of
fan fictions is a desire for more: for what comes next, for a fuller or a better
ending. So texts which end abruptly, or unhappily, or ambiguously are very
often extended or rewritten: hence the large numbers of stories that take
place the day after the happenings of John Hughes’s teen movie The Break-
fast Club, which try to resolve the question of whether the disparate group
of teenagers brought together for a Saturday’s detention will speak to each
other when they meet in the hallways on Monday.25 Or the rash of ‘fix-it’
stories that followed the cataclysmic ending of the third series of the BBC’s
Torchwood, in which a favourite character was killed and the lead character
horribly morally compromised.26 This energy is particularly apparent in the
case of ongoing series, which is why TV shows often develop such active
and involved fandoms. It is one reason for the massive proliferation of
Harry Potter fan fictions – in the increasingly lengthy gaps between the
publication of the books of the series fans speculated, imagining the twists
and turns of plot that might follow. Many launched epics of their own off
the back of J. K. Rowling’s creation: fan fiction comes not just in the form of
short stories, but novels and even vast novel sequences. Rowling’s is a good
example of another key component in the generation of fan fictions: world
creation. It is no accident that by far the most co-opted stories belong in the
fantasy genre. Fantasy, by definition, takes place somewhere else, in a world
that the writer has to imagine into being in every detail. This provides a
playground for the writers of fan fiction, who can elaborate on these details
and shine light into corners that the original texts leave shadowed; so many
fan fictions pick up on one aspect of the world in question and spin a
narrative around it: in the case of Harry Potter the nature of house-elf
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magic, for instance, or the way in which wizard portraits function. Rowling
also illustrates well another generative impulse for fan fiction: the things
that a text does badly or not at all. Like many fantasies, Rowling’s are
somewhat unidimensional in the treatment of morality and character
(though this begins to be complicated in the later books in the series): the
central notion that all children can be divided into four houses on the basis
of one primary characteristic is one that is questioned by many of the
writers who trespass on her creation. It is for this reason that so much fan
fiction concerns itself with the Slytherins, and with Draco Malfoy and
Severus Snape in particular. Fan fictions do not necessarily occupy a pos-
ition of subordination in relation to their originating text, and very often the
impulse to write is produced by exasperation or rage at the inadequacies of
that text or by the direction its plot is taking. Fans, as many TV producers
know to their cost, feel that theirs is an ownership of and investment in texts
equal to that of their creators, and they are not slow to express their
dissatisfaction. Long-running fandoms, or sections of them, often evolve
into a position of considerable hostility to the ‘canon’ text, which they
happily replace with their own ‘fanon’ version.
This points to a key element in the proliferation of fan narratives: the fact
that, for the most part, they are produced and enjoyed in the context of fan
communities. Much fan activity takes place on sites like LiveJournal, which
combine blogging and social networking elements. Members write their
own journals, ‘friend’ – read and comment on – those of others, and join
communities based on specific interests. In the site’s table of popular inter-
ests the current top runner is ‘music’, with 1,854,835 individuals and
communities listing it; ‘fan fiction’ is given as an interest by well over a
hundred thousand; with the Harry Potter fandom listed separately by nearly
four hundred thousand. The generation, proliferation and operation of fan
communities is a fascinating subject, and one that would repay further
study. As Matt Hills noted in Fan Culture (2002), previous work on the
subject has tended to represent fandoms as static and separate, rather than
fluid and dynamic:
By ignoring the fan as subject, previous studies have . . . neglected the multi-
dimensionality of fandom. Fan cultures are typically approached as isolated
and singular ‘things’; Star Trek fans, or X-Philes, or Elvis fans. This ignores the
extent to which fans of one text or icon may be fans of other seemingly
unrelated texts/icons, and . . . provides a rather unhelpful view of fan cultures
as securely ‘bounded entities’.27
In fact, fandoms grow and change almost before your eyes. They mush-
room overnight in response to a new text, with enthusiasts dragging with
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them friends from other fandoms, and new conventions and expectations
evolving as the membership grows. They splinter just as readily, personal
feuds and predilections sending members off to found new communities,
with dramatic fandom wars sometimes the result. The commonest
reasons for splinters is the passionate advocacy of various ‘shippers’.
The term originally derived from the word ‘worship’ but is used univer-
sally to refer to people who support or are mainly interested in the
relationship between two canon characters. Harry Potter fans who want
to read stories about a romantic relationship between Harry Potter and
Hermione Granger separate themselves off from and are often actively
hostile to those who prefer to see Harry with Ginny Weasley. One of the
most popular Harry Potter pairings is known as H/D: Harry Potter and
Draco Malfoy. This brings us to one of the most contentious and most
interesting features of the fan fiction phenomenon: slash. Slash fiction is
broadly definable as stories in which male characters who are assumed by
canon to be heterosexual are put into a scenario in which they are in or
develop a romantic and/or sexual relationship with another man. The
term slash derives from the sigil ‘/’ used to separate the initials of any two
characters the writer is placing in a pair-bond, and is said to have first
derived from the distinction employed in the Star Trek fandom of Kirk
and Spock stories in which they were just friends and Kirk/Spock stories
in which they were a whole lot more. Slash is tremendously popular, with
many fandoms forming simply because of the ‘slashable’ potential of the
main male characters. As far as we can determine, given the identification
issues posed by the internet, the vast majority of its writers and readers
are straight women. So how do we account for the scenario of hundreds
of thousands of (mostly) straight women all over the world writing and
reading about sexual and romantic encounters between men? My own
position is that the phenomenon tells us almost nothing about gay male
sexuality, and a great deal about the cultural and narrative dissatisfac-
tions of women. (That slash has little to do with real gay men can be
determined by a simple comparison of the stories to be found in any slash
archive and those on the Nifty archive – a repository of gay erotic stories
posted by amateur writers. They could not be more different: even the
most bodily specific overtly pornographic slash stories have at their core
an interest in feelings, however dark, while most Nifty stories have very
little interest in emotions and are much more interested in the virtually
rhythmic employment of a series of transgressive and therefore mastur-
batory tropes. Even in its choreographing of the sexual acts of its
protagonists, slash is female rather than male: we find far more acts of
anal penetration in slash than in male-authored amateur gay pornography
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and far fewer examples of oral sex, and – most strikingly – a far greater
emphasis on the prostate, which almost all slash writers imagine as a sort
of clitoris.) What slash allows women is the possibility of stepping out of
the narrow textual possibilities afforded by identification with the female
protagonist or sidekick, and the opportunity to imagine themselves into
the role – and body – of the more dynamic male lead. The phenomenon
raises far more issues than there is space to discuss here – notably the
misogynistic impulses latent in much slash fiction – but for the moment
I want to note it as simply one of the more radical ways in which fan
fiction functions as an intensely active, rather than passive, form of reread-
ing. Fan fiction is often very knowing: it has to understand the conventions
of the originating text fully to be effective, and at its best it plays games
with those conventions. It is also intensely engaged with pleasure. Fan
fiction writers are immediately responsive to and at the mercy of their
readers, and soon learn to give them what they want. In many ways it
represents the apotheosis of the trends so deplored by the highbrow writers
of the interwar years: the text is wrested from the author’s control and
rewritten to suit the whims and demands of its readers. It becomes an
instrument for their pleasure and perversion, endlessly malleable, continu-
ally rewritten, a constantly shifting locus of desire.
Earlier discussions of popular literature and other forms of popular
culture have often been preoccupied with the issue of whether we should
interpret their readers or consumers as dupes of a controlling industrial
complex or as liberated independent agents. What fan communities, popu-
lar book clubs and all the institutions of the interwar middlebrow demon-
strate is that very often they – we – are both. Fan culture is certainly
manipulated by those who produce its original artifacts, but it is also an
anarchic force ultimately in the control of its fans, who can – and frequently
do – choose to go elsewhere, and who read persistently and wilfully against
the most obvious grains of the texts with which they play. We can find
similar impulses at play in the always hybrid and shifting readings and
ideologies offered by the interwar middlebrow, which is at once highly
commodified and reliant on sophisticated, multifaceted readerly engage-
ment. Popular reading is almost always active, interventionist, remaking
of the forms it consumes – and yet at the same time it is also relaxed,
passive, indolent (which is why we so enjoy it). The thing that unites
these seemingly contradictory possibilities is the existence of a reading
community. As with camp, which relies on the presence of others who
understand the double layers of the gesture, the community allows the
reader to play with different layers of reading engagement in the company
of someone else who shares the pleasure and who gets the joke.
100
NOTES
1 George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’ (1936), in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus
(eds.), An Age Like This: George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and
Letters 1920–1940 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), vol. i, p. 245.
2 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Litera-
ture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
3 Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass
Reading Public, 1800–1900 (University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 243.
4 See Jenny Hartley’s Reading Groups (Oxford University Press, 2001), in which
she collects the results of a survey of over three hundred such groups she carried
out with Sarah Turvey.
5 Valerie Grove, Dear Dodie: The Life of Dodie Smith (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1996), p. 179.
6 Publicity leaflet for The Book Club (Non-Political), run by W. and G. Foyle Ltd.,
121 Charing Cross Road; in Box: Book Clubs 1, John Johnson Collection,
Bodleian Library.
7 John Betjeman, ‘In Westminster Abbey’, Old Lights for New Chancels (1940),
in Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 1958), p. 85.
8 Cited in Nicola Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel, 1914–39
(London: Virago, 1983), p. 13.
9 John Baker, Low Cost of Bookloving: An Account of the First Twenty-One Years
of Readers Union (London: Readers Union, 1958), p. 12.
10 D. T. Max, ‘She has Created 28 Bestsellers in a Row’, Guardian, 4 January 2000.
11 Nonetheless, almost half of the authors Hartley and Turvey list in the top thirty
read by their surveyed book groups in 1999 also appear in Waterstone’s bestsel-
ling authors list for that year.
12 Elizabeth Long, ‘Textual Interpretation as Collective Action’, in Jonathan
Boyarin (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), p. 203.
13 Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary
Taste and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1997), p. 249.
14 Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love (1945) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970),
p. 192. I have suggested elsewhere that this doubleness of vision in the interwar
woman’s middlebrow novel functions as a kind of camp: Nicola Humble, ‘The
Queer Pleasures of Reading: Camp and the Middlebrow’, in Mary Grover and
Erica Brown (eds.), Middlebrow Matters: Cultural Hierarchy and Literary Value
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
15 See Alison Light’s Forever England (London: Routledge, 1991); Beauman, whose
pioneering study A Very Great Profession brought back to consciousness many
lost texts; and my own The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class,
Domesticity and Bohemianism (Oxford University Press, 2001).
16 Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 83.
17 ‘You go, girl . . . and she went’, The Age 21 (Jan. 2006), www.mobylives.com/
Oprah_v_Franzen.html. For further discussion of Franzen’s rejection of Oprah
see Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field
(London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 25–7.
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18 Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’, in Orwell and Angus (eds.), An Age Like This,
p. 244.
19 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) (London: Chatto & Windus,
1978), p. 7.
20 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979),
trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 327.
21 Agatha Christie, The Hollow (1946) (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 7.
22 Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1949) (London: Reprint Society, 1950),
p. 342.
23 Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths (1931) (London: Virago,
1988), p. 12.
24 For an in-depth analysis of Star Trek fan fiction, see Constance Penley, NASA/
TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (London: Verso, 1997).
25 See the Breakfast Club section of Fanfiction.net: www.fanfiction.net/movie/
Breakfast_Club/.
26 Examples can be found at one of the many communities devoted to the
programme: community.livejournal.com/torchwoodslash/.
27 Matt Hills, Fan Culture (London: Routledge, 2002), p. xiv. See also Henry
Jenkins’s Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London:
Routledge, 1992); his later Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory
Media (New York University Press, 2006); and Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss
and C. Lee Harrington (eds.), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Media
World (New York University Press, 2007).
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6
SCOTT MCCRACKEN
Reading time: popular fiction

and the everyday
When the bedside telephone in his Paris hotel room rings in the middle
of the night, Robert Langdon, the hero of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel,
The Da Vinci Code, awakes slowly and is at first confused.
Where the hell am I?
The jacquard bathrobe hanging on his bedpost bore the monogram: HOTEL
RITZ PARIS.
Next his eyes focus on ‘a crumpled flyer on his bedside table’:

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
proudly presents
AN EVENING WITH ROBERT LANGDON
PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS SYMBOLOGY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
A famous academic as well as an accidental detective, it is not surprising that

Robert Langdon orientates himself through reading. He is prodigiously well
read, supplying much of the overload of information for which Brown’s
thrillers are notorious. But Langdon’s love of reading does not make him
unusual amongst fictonal sleuths. A very different detective, Mikael Blomkvist,
the left-wing, journalist hero of Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium Trilogy’, is also a
voracious reader, getting through piles of documents, obtained both legally
and illegally, as he tracks down murderers, sex traffickers and rogue spies in
the Swedish secret service. The reading skills of his partner and sometime
lover, Lisbeth Salander, are facilitated by a photographic memory. Easy Raw-
lins, the self-educated detective in Walter Mosley’s series of novels, betrays his
reading by his speech: ‘Why Easy . . . I do believe that you have read a book
or two,’1 remarks one of the many femmes fatales he encounters on his investi-
gations in Los Angeles. It seems that, if detectives are anything to go by,
the reader of popular fiction likes reading about readers; and, from Don
Quixote onwards, the novel has given us representations of what we might
call the ideal reader, one who is totally absorbed, whether seduced by fantasy,
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as with Don Quixote or Emma Bovary, in pursuit of knowledge like Robert

Langdon, or justice, in the cases of Mikael Blomkvist or Easy Rawlins.
Yet, despite the centrality of reading to modern cultures, and the ubiquity
of its representations in popular fiction, the experience of reading remains
difficult to analyse. The reader’s private, subjective, unrecorded engagement
with the text is notoriously difficult to access; and this is perhaps why both
novelists and historians of reading have focused on the external, more
‘readable’, manifestations of reading: visual images of the reader; the
changing nature of the material text; or the reader’s membership of wider
communities or social groups. This chapter will ask: what actually happens
when we read popular fiction? How does the experience relate to, and how
is it different from, the ordinary experience of the everyday? The answers to
these questions must, inevitably, be speculative. We cannot get directly into
the mind of the individual reader; but the answers are important, because
critical debates about popular fiction are as much about the value of the
experience of reading as about the text itself. Dismissal of the popular text
as worthless means dismissal of the time spent reading as wasted time. The
experience is discounted in comparison with implicit alternatives: reading as
an elevated, almost spiritual experience, a seeking after truth; reading as a
useful form of work, the extraction of knowledge or information from a
text; or even reading as a form of meditation, an oasis of calm in the midst
of the busy-ness of daily life.
This opposition between the serious and the non-serious reader breaks
down under scrutiny, but it makes a good starting point because it under-
pins the critical history of popular fiction. It informs, for example, distinc-
tions between intensive and extensive reading and between notions of
absorption and distraction. Such oppositions tend to privilege the intensive,
absorbed reader over the extensive, distracted reader: the ‘indiscriminate’
reader of many texts, who is merely bored or waiting for something better
to happen. The higher purpose of the ideal (intensive, absorbed) reader
is usually compared, unfavourably, with the pleasures of entertainment,
stimulation, sentimentality and fantasy.
The ideal reader

Who is the ideal reader? And what is the origin of that ideal’s long history?
A telling version can be found in nineteenth-century paintings, where
women readers are represented looking composed, absorbed and serene.
Even when outside, such as in Charles Perugini’s Girl Reading (1878), they
are situated in a carefully arranged space, framed by the garden seat, the
bower, or the shrubbery. The act of reading is performed as if it were a ritual
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Reading time: popular fiction and the everyday
or rite. Position is key: the favourite chair, proximity to the fire, a handy
table, the comfort of plumped-up cushions. Despite the associations of
languor or even luxury in such representations, their most direct relation-
ship seems to be to reading as a religious experience: to the opening of the
scriptures, to serious contemplation of the sacred. Such reading appears to
be descended from the reading of the priest, the rabbi, the philosopher or
the scholar. The ideal reader here seems to exist, if not in a sacred, at least in
an enchanted world, untroubled by external influences, inhabiting only the
reality created by the text. However, if we invite an individual reader, this
reader for example, to conduct an honest ethnography of his own reading
practice, we find a different kind of reading.
In an hour of ‘reading’, I do not stay still. More than my face moves.
I change from one chair to another. I change position in my chair. I adjust
the lighting. I stop reading and make a cup of tea. I get up and look out of
the window. I go to the toilet, taking the book with me, placing it on the
floor and holding it open with both feet. I consult another book. A headline
in the newspaper on the floor nearby catches my eye. I read the article. I surf
the internet in a search only tangentially related to the text, and that search
leads to other searches. I look out of the window again. I check how many
pages I have read. I start reading again. Someone comes into the room and
starts speaking to me. I do not look up until I have finished the paragraph,
and then with some annoyance. I imply with my body, with words, that
I resent the interruption, that I am very busy. The interrupter leaves the
room. The atmosphere stays. I spend several minutes trying to return to the
text. I look out of the window again. I count how many pages until the end
of the chapter, then how many to the end of the book. I look up a word in
the dictionary. I put the book down and stare at nothing in particular. I read
on. I don’t read on. I stop reading. I have ‘read’ for an hour.
This is of course only one kind of reading, an example of distracted
reading and a reminder that, as Michel de Certeau says: reading is an
embodied process.2 It is also possible to read, absorbed and motionless for
minutes, although probably not hours, at a time. At such times, we do feel
that we are in the text, that only the text exists for us. Our subjectivity has
been temporarily dissolved. We are in the scene of fantasy the text creates,
so that our reading experience is like dreaming. The outer world exists in
another dimension. It intrudes only like a noise heard through a partition
wall. To be interrupted in this condition is to experience a jarring sensation
akin to being woken from a deep sleep. We feel not false, but real anger,
resentment that the dream has been broken. Yet even the absorbed reader is,
at some level of consciousness, still in the world. In this respect, at least, the
ideal reader is just an ideal. Reading always includes a physical interaction
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with the reader’s environment. Once this, not perhaps startling, conclusion
is reached, it becomes obvious that the reader’s consciousness can never
be entirely absorbed by the text and even apparent self-absorption can
mask hidden desires. In fact, although I used the example of women readers
in nineteenth-century paintings, Kate Flint’s study, The Woman Reader,
1837–1914, suggests that such images are not as untroubling as a first
impression might suggest:
the self-absorption of the readers depicted implies some of the reasons why
the private activity of reading tended so persistently to come under scrutiny.
It hints at the subject’s vulnerability to textual influence, deaf and blind to
all other stimuli in her immediate environment. It suggests the potential
autonomy of her mind, mirrored in her self-sufficient postures.3
Flint also points to another aspect of such Victorian images, that they are
objects of erotic desire for the male viewer. In Perugini’s Girl Reading
(a painting not discussed by Flint), the young woman is portrayed dressed in
virginal white, eyes cast down, and apparently totally absorbed by the book on
her lap.4 Yet, at the same time, the orange on the tree to her right and the more
prominent fruit on the seat by her side as well as the blossom she holds in her
hand all suggest temptation. The viewer is presented with a privileged perspec-
tive on a private interior moment, which might be a moment of serious
contemplation, but which might herald the secret quickening of desire. The
reader’s sexual autonomy is hinted by her ‘self-sufficient postures’: the way she
cradles her elbow in her left hand, implying a self-assurance and contentment
that does not require others. (The fear that solitary reading might prompt
masturbation was an undercurrent in the advice literature of the Victorian
period.) Thus, the painting dramatises the contradictions in play between
being in the text and being in the world, between apparent serenity (worldless-
ness) and pleasurable stimulation. It suggests that there is no strict boundary
between what, for shorthand, we might call sacred and profane experiences of
reading, but rather a dynamic interaction between the two.
Visual images of the reader are helpful to our understanding of the
reading experience because they allow a representation of the relationship
between the reader’s situation, the text and the reader’s subjective (private,
intimate) consciousness. They represent reading as a spatial, embodied
experience, where the forms of attention the text demands can never com-
pletely exclude the reader’s sense of her or his environment. Such images are
less helpful to our understanding of the different modes of temporality that
constitute the reading experience. For example, the difference between the
everyday time of the reader, the time of reading and the way the narrative
organises time. These, often conflicting, temporalities further complicate
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the idea that reading takes place in a privileged time and space. Instead, they
demonstrate how reading is itself a historical experience, one that changes
over time; and while historians of reading have acknowledged the difficulty
of reconstructing the experience of reading, they have attempted to chart
the way it has changed by constructing a historical narrative that extends
from the ancient world to the present.
Histories of reading
After the emergence of writing in the fourth millennium before the Christian
era (bce), historians of reading have identified six significant changes in the
way people read over two and a half millennia. The first occurred in the
fifth century bce, when texts appeared that were designed to be read, as
opposed to being records of events or laws. The second stage occurred in the
second century of the Christian era (ce), which saw the beginning of
individual silent (or murmured) reading. Before that date, texts were read
aloud, usually to an audience. The third occurred during the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries ce, which saw the emergence of a ‘scholastic mode of
reading’, in which the book is both the ‘object and the instrument of
intellectual labour’.5 The scholastic mode of reading builds on the tradition
of reading holy scriptures (or sacred reading) and feeds into the notion of
the modern ideal reader. By the seventeenth century, a practical ‘layman’s’
version of scholastic reading performed by literate craftsmen who sought
out practical texts such as manuals and how-to books, created a parallel
notion of useful reading. Useful reading gained increasing currency as the
industrial revolution got off the ground, but the reading matter of appren-
tice boys and young women also led to one of the first moral panics about
the spread of literacy.6 The fourth stage accompanied the profusion of texts
and increased literacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which saw
the growth of extensive reading (known as the ‘reading revolution’ in
Germany) of a number of texts, as opposed to the intensive, attentive or
absorbed reading of single texts. For some scholars, this was the moment
when popular fiction in the modern sense emerged. However, contemporary
genre fiction has its origins in the fifth stage: the industrial reproduction of
texts in the nineteenth century.7 The gradual achievement of full literacy
and the concomitant availability of cheap, mass-produced newspapers,
magazines and books in the context of the visual spectacles offered by the
industrial city gave rise to new forms of attention which don’t fall easily into
the binary of absorbed versus distracted reading. This created the foun-
dation for the sixth stage: the interactions between genre fictions, radio,
cinema and television in the twentieth century. A final stage might also be
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identified, the emergent, but still uncertain decline of print in favour of

reading on screens, electronic ‘tablets’, e-readers and other mobile devices.
This historical narrative offers a helpful structure for understanding both
the history of the experience of reading and the factors which condition that
experience: the changing nature of the material text; the changing conditions of
reception; the social structures within which the text is read; the changing nature
of subjectivity; new technologies of production; growing rates of literacy and
education. However, the narrative is by no means unchallenged, even by those
historians who have constructed it. Individual reading, for example reading
while travelling, was not unknown even in the ancient world.8 While forms of
self-reflexive reading must certainly have been enhanced by the emergence of
individual, silent reading, various forms of commentaries on texts have always
existed, first in oral, then in written form. Even scholastic reading, perhaps the
mode closest to the ideal reader, was always accompanied by irreverence and
parody and, as Mikhail Bakhtin has shown, parodies of sacred and ‘serious’ texts
date back to the earliest forms of written fiction.9 Equally, examples of extensive
reading, if only by an elite of educated and privileged readers, predate the
eighteenth century. Don Quixote, the eponymous hero of what is widely
regarded as one of the first novels, is both an extensive and an intensive reader
of the romances that fuel his fantasies. The novel’s narrator (who claims only to
have discovered the text and had it translated) describes himself as having ‘a taste
for reading even torn papers lying in the streets’.10 In fact, there is an argument to
be made that the process of reading has always been intertextual, in the sense that
other narratives, oral and written, interfere and interact with our reception of the
text in front of us. Kate Flint cites Julia Kristeva, who regards reading as ‘a form
of aggressive participation, with each reader attempting to incorporate quota-
tions and allusions into a coherent semiotic unit’.11 If even the silent reading of an
individual text always takes place in relation to other texts, it becomes more
difficult to separate out the practices of intensive and extensive reading. The
reader is reliant on a knowledge of narrative conventions in order to render it
comprehensible. Not only the opposition between intensive and extensive read-
ings, but between attentive and distracted, scholarly and lay, and sacred and
profane break down in the face of the actuality of the experience of reading,
which is always an impure act. But does this mean that we should replace the
ahistorical ideal reader with a new transhistorical experience of reading as a
carnivalesque space in which almost anything is possible – all life is there?
Reading and the everyday

A more nuanced history of reading would have to place the different
readings of an individual text within a ‘thick description’ of the material
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conditions in which it is read.12 These might include: the material nature of

the text; an account of who had access to it; literacy rates; as well as more
traditional literary critical concerns about narrative form. Such conditions
have been important factors in how a text was valued. At each stage in the
history of the book, from roll, to codex (bound book), to the three-decker
novel borrowed from the nineteenth-century circulating libraries, to mass-
market paperback, to e-reader, the text has become available to a larger and
larger audience, feeding the insatiable appetites of a newly literate popu-
lation, and increasing the possibilities for democratic debate and discussion.
Yet the reputation of a text seems to diminish as its readership grows.
The more a text becomes part of general experience, the more it loses its
mystique or aura,13 becoming associated with corporeal rather than intel-
lectual or spiritual experience. In Don Quixote, which is both a novel and a
comic exploration of the fate of the popular text, its condition is dramatised
by the two protagonists: Don Quixote, who, inspired by his reading of
chivalric romances, exists, half-starved, almost entirely in the world of the
imagination, and his faithful servant Sancho Panza who lives through
bodily experience: eating, drinking, sleeping and defecating. In these two
characters, the world of the popular text and the world of the everyday
interact. In one sense, the novel invents the everyday by bringing ordinary
lives to representation. Novels of sensibility and early Gothic texts docu-
mented the emotional, the visceral and the sexual in what seems to have
been a response to the elevation of rationality during the Enlightenment in
the eighteenth century. The ‘reading mania’ of this period suggests a bodily
compulsion rather than a religious duty or scholarly practice. The decline of
the ideal reader is also associated with the lack of a devotional or intellec-
tual space in which the text is read. As many of the chapters in this volume
point out, popular reading is associated with groups, with the exchange of
texts, with collective rather than individual experience, with female bodies
rather than the masculine mind, and with the move to a mass, industrial
society. We might suggest, therefore, that with mass reading, it is not so
much that the popular text is more imbricated in the overlapping practices
of everyday life, but that it is more explicit about that imbrication: Don
Quixote depends heavily on Sancho Panza’s practicality.
A phenomenology of reading
So what are the forms of attention that characterise the still shadowy
experience of reading the popular text? Even the ideal reader is engaged in
an act of perception: the visual registration and deciphering of words on a
page. But the reader will also perceive the material nature of the page: the
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ease with which it can be held and manipulated, whether it comes as part of
a scroll, or a book, a magazine, or a newspaper. This perception will be
conditioned by the situation of the reader: whether at a desk, in a comfort-
able chair, standing in line, sitting on a bus, a train, an aeroplane. The
reader will either register a silent environment or be disturbed by, or
perhaps screen out, a noisy one. Paradoxically, the act of reading may, for
some people, become easier if it is a refuge from one’s surroundings. The
phenomenologist14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘My field of perception
is constantly filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensa-
tions which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my clearly perceived
world, yet which I nevertheless immediately “place” in the world, without
ever confusing them with my daydreams.’15 Reading takes place amidst
these sensations, but it also interacts with the non-material world, our
daydreams, which Merleau-Ponty says we weave around things: ‘I imagine
people and things whose presence is not incompatible with my context, yet
who are not in fact involved in it: they are ahead of reality, in the realm of
the imaginary.’16 Reading provokes fantasy. Thus a phenomenology of
reading, a philosophical investigation into its essence, would have to include
materiality of the text, reading as an embodied act, and the imaginary world
stimulated by the text.
Just as the intensive and extensive reading can occur at the same time, so
attentive and distracted reading are not as dissimilar as they might first
appear. The notion of ‘distraction’ in particular is not straightforward. It
can mean a general inattention, which might be associated with ‘extensive’
reading. But it can also describe being distracted towards something that
demands greater attention.17 Attention is always performed against con-
stant distraction, both material and mental. What we might call the rituals
of reading – in a certain place, as part of ending the waking day and going to
sleep – create certain habits that are aided by forms of writing to which we
have become habituated. But what is the relationship between the habits of
how we read and the texts to which we have become accustomed? The key,
Paul Ricoeur suggests, lies in how we experience time.
Ricoeur argues that we are only able to understand time, and its three
elements, the past, the present and the future, through narrative: ‘time
becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of
a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the
features of temporal experience’.18 Narrative has the capacity to take us out
of our present situation into a mode where memory and anticipation can
also be thought: ‘Narration . . . implies memory and prediction implies
expectation.’19 The reader, for Ricoeur is an ‘operator’, rather than a
passive recipient, and reading is a ‘concrete process’, where the form of
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the text, the ‘textual configuration’, facilitates the reader’s ‘prefiguration’ of

what is to come and his or her ‘refiguration’ of what has been.20 Yet there is
a paradox here. If we accept Ricoeur’s understanding of reading as a
practical activity, it is often a practical activity upon which we do not
reflect, and which, particularly if we are reading popular texts, is to occupy
‘wasted time’ or ‘dead time’, the time of boredom, of waiting, or of idleness.
Popular texts intervene into this ‘dead time’ with their own assessments of
the past, recognitions of the present and anticipations of the future. In this
respect, the read text is a nexus of temporalities, where the reader is able to
negotiate her or his place in time through the dynamic interaction between
the everyday and the text.
Bestsellers, thrillers, detectives

In order to discuss the relationship between the time of reading and narra-
tive time properly, let us return to the popular text itself, specifically, the
writers with whom I started: Dan Brown, author of the bestseller, The Da
Vinci Code (2003) and, more recently, The Lost Symbol (2009); Stieg
Larsson, the author of the Millennium trilogy (2008–921); and Walter
Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins series. In the rest of this chapter
I want to use the approaches to the experience of reading discussed above
to read The Lost Symbol and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, ending with
a discussion of the most recent Rawlins novels. Both The Lost Symbol and
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are thrillers22 and both were bestsellers.
The genre of the thriller and the notion of the bestseller set up certain
expectations about the reader of such a text, expectations discussed else-
where in this volume.23 It is therefore interesting that, as we saw at the
beginning of this chapter, reading is represented as a valuable activity.
Brown’s hero, the Symbologist, Robert Langdon, draws his knowledge from
an eclectic range of sources, including Wikipedia. He is also a performer,
delivering public lectures on his (fictional) discipline to rapt audiences.
Larsson’s hero, Mikael Blomkvist, is also engaged in serious, political work
and, like Robert Langdon, he is a populist. His revelations about the dark
underbelly of Swedish society are timed to gain maximum exposure in the
media. Thus, in each text, the reader is positioned between the ‘serious’
world of the detective and the more labile world of entertainment. This
position, between the protagonist as ideal reader and a more distracting, but
perhaps more pleasurable world, reflects the divided experience of reading
the thriller, where, on the one hand, the plot is compelling, demanding the
reader’s attention, while, on the other, the narrative has the serial quality
described by John Caughie: it permits a distracted, interrupted reading.24
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The plot is made up of short episodes, often with the ‘cliffhanger’ endings
that became popular in the movie serials of the 1920s and 1930s, but
which, as David Glover and Nicholas Daly point out in this volume, go
back much earlier. The Lost Symbol, in which Langdon solves a murder and
the mystery of the ‘symbology’ of Washington DC, has 133 chapters. For
example, chapter 35 ends:
Robert Langdon stared in disbelief at the deepest recess of the chamber.

To his horror something was staring back.25
Such breaks encourage the reader to read on, but where there is no such
incentive, the frequent chapter endings mark a break for the reader. Chapter
endings without cliffhangers mimic the commercial breaks in television
shows, ending one chapter and beginning the next with a contextualising
sentence. Thus, chapter 128 ends:
Langdon had never seen the Capitol from this perspective – hovering 555 feet
in the air atop America’s great Egyptian obelisk. Tonight, for the first time in
his life, he had ridden the elevator up to the tiny viewing chamber . . . at the
pinnacle of the Washington monument. [ellipsis in text]
And, over the page, chapter 129 begins:
Robert Langdon stood mesmerised in the glass portal, absorbing the power
of the landscape below him.
In both cases, however, the narrative relies on suspense and the promise
of new action, which encourages the reader either to read on or, at the
very least, to return as soon as possible to the story. In this respect, the
popular text has the capacity to colonise everyday time, structuring both
the present – the time in which it is read – and the future – the time in which
it might be read. Not only are both texts episodic in structure, they are part
of a longer series, so that the reader of one might well plan to read the
sequels. It is not uncommon for readers to save a sequel for a future holiday,
for example. The Lost Symbol is the third Robert Langdon thriller. The Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo is the first of three Blomkvist stories Larsson
completed before his death in what was projected to be a longer series.
The thriller thus allows for different forms of attention, which rely on a
comprehensive knowledge of what to expect from the genre, a knowledge
culled not just from written fiction, but also from film and television. Yet
despite the familiarity of the structure, like the popular song, the successful
thriller has to have a ‘hook’, an intriguing element of originality, which
draws the reader in. Some, even most, of the rest of the material can be
generic filler, over which the reader can skip or skim,26 as long as she or he
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has been successfully caught. In Brown’s thrillers, the hook is usually a

puzzle or a code, the characters are relatively conventional (even bland),
two-dimensional figures. In Larsson, the puzzle is a more complex social
mystery, which permeates Swedish society and which his detectives, Blomk-
vist and Salander, are able to penetrate because of their own relatively
oblique relationships to social convention.
The relationship between the hook and ‘filler’ means that reading a
thriller involves a dynamic relationship between different forms of atten-
tion, from absorbed to distracted. Once this is accepted, the critical
question is not whether the text is serious or non-serious, but about the
interaction between different modes of attention and between the text and
the situations in which the text is read. Although it may be the case that
reading, from its earliest beginnings, has involved a variety of modes, both
the changing historical situation of readers and the changing modes of
production of texts suggest that each period creates its own conditions of
attention. The age of popular fiction is the age of mass society, a time when
multiple distractions compete with reading. But, as Graeme Gilloch points
out when discussing one of the early theorists of modernity, Walter
Benjamin, distracted forms of attention (where distraction means that
attention is short-lived and has multiple objects) need not necessarily mean
an inability to think:
distraction refers not to the inability to concentrate, to mere inattention per se,
but rather involves attention directed elsewhere, a concern with the periph-
eral, marginal, and neglected. Conceived in this way, distraction signals an
openness to contingency and happenstance, a penchant for the diffuse and
dispersed. It is a form of accomplishment rather than a failing. Distraction,
like losing oneself in a city, is a skill to be learned and honed, it requires that
time is spent on the ‘training ground’. Indeed, as Benjamin stresses, acting in a
state of distraction is only possible when the task at hand has already been
mastered to such a degree that concentration is unnecessary. Distraction rests
on an expertise born of confidence and habitual acquaintance. Film offers us,
perhaps, the reproduction, the recognition and mastery of shock, that habitual
experience of the city.27
Distraction, as much as absorption, may become a productive mode.

Although he uses the example of film rather than fiction, the ‘expertise
born of confidence and habitual acquaintance’ Gilloch describes is not
unlike the reader’s grasp of the conventions of a popular fictional genre.
His or her ‘expertise’ with the familiar structure paradoxically allows an
escape from the numbing shock-effects of modernity. The gift of popular
fiction is also to allow the reader a space and a time in which she or he
can become accomplished in distraction and achieve new, and perhaps
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productive, forms of attention. These new forms permit the reader to

negotiate the dispersed temporalities of modernity.
Boredom, waiting, anticipation

Different popular texts deliver this, the gift of the popular text, in different
ways. Even within a specific genre such as the thriller (admittedly a diverse
form), different modes are emphasised. However, to return to Paul Ricoeur’s
insight about narrative making time human – ‘narrative . . . is meaningful to
the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience’ – thriller
narratives organise time in particular ways, allowing absorbed, even compul-
sive reading as well as more contemplative periods. In The Lost Symbol, there
is not much time for contemplation. The action hardly pauses, taking less
than twenty-four hours from start to finish. Although Robert Langdon is
constantly thinking, he is forced to draw on his vast reservoir of knowledge
on the hoof. The reader is not permitted access to his unguarded conscious-
ness. His knowledge is delivered in controlled, didactic fashion. There is little
chance of the reader finding her or his own solution to the arcane puzzles
Langdon comes across in his hunt for the truth. We are in his hands.
Where The Lost Symbol leaves no room for contemplation and
barely time for pause for thought, the two detectives in The Girl with the
Dragoon Tatoo find they have time to kill. At the beginning of the first
volume, Mikael Blomkvist makes a decision to retreat from Stockholm after
losing a libel action by a wealthy businessman, Hans-Erik Wennerström.
Blomkvist’s retreat, while only a tactical move in the ongoing investigation
into Wennerström’s criminal activities, allows him the opportunity to read
and to think. He moves to a small town in the north of Sweden, ostensibly on
a commission to write the family history of the Vangers, rich industrialists,
who have their fair share of cupboards well stocked with skeletons. In reality,
he has been hired by the elderly head of the family, Henrik Vanger, to
investigate the disappearance, and possible murder, of Henrik’s great-niece,
Harriet Vanger, forty years earlier. To complete the layers of disguise, decep-
tion and detection, Blomkvist is himself being investigated by another private
detective, Lisbeth Salander, a character whose appearance and abilities sug-
gest she has much in common with female characters from graphic novels
such as Tank Girl or the women in William Gibson’s cyberpunk stories.28 She
is ill at ease with people, but preternaturally adept at hacking into computer
systems. Originally hired by Blomkvist’s new employer, Martin Vanger, to
check out his background, she continues the investigation independently
when Vanger is satisfied, intrigued by the fact that Blomkvist did not contest
Wennerström’s libel case.
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Salander decides to continue with her investigations of Blomkvist and

Wennerström because she ‘had nothing else on’.29 Thus, the time of investi-
gation is a time, not without purpose, but before the purpose is known, a
time akin to Adam Phillips’s description of the time of boredom as: ‘that
state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing
begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd
and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire’: or Benjamin’s definition of
boredom as ‘when we don’t know what we are waiting for’.30 Both Salander
and Blomkvist are at odds with society. Blomkvist has to serve a short,
three-month, prison sentence – although (because of the liberal Swedish
penal system) he does not find ‘doing time’ that unpleasant. Salander does
not enjoy full rights as a citizen. She is a ward of court, not allowed financial
control over her life and subject to the predations of an unscrupulous
lawyer, appointed by the state to supervise her. Both lead necessarily secret-
ive lives: lives in disguise. The process of detection takes place during a
kind of no-time: ‘boredom’, Adam Phillips writes, ‘is integral to the process
of taking one’s time’,31 a time of reflection made possible by the detectives’
retreat during the long, dark, northern winter; and it is this time that allows
Blomkvist and Salander to figure out the mystery. Even once the detective
has something to go on, he or she spends a lot of time waiting, a position
shared with the reader, who is also waiting for the investigation to progress,
or for something to happen. Despite the fact that Dan Brown’s action-
packed novels take the form of a pursuit, the deferral of the final solution
means that the reader is kept waiting, even as detective rushes (or is chased)
towards his destination. The time of the reader and the time of the detective
are therefore comparable, if not exactly the same.
It has often been noted that in the detective novel the reader becomes a
detective. Less remarked upon is that the detective also becomes a reader.
We might say that the detective novel offers a reflection on the time of
reading as a time of boredom, waiting and anticipation: each of these states
involves an attitude to time and a particular mode of attention. For
example, both readers and detectives wait, while popular fiction is itself
often read while waiting. The cultural critic, Siegfried Kracauer, identified
waiting as an aspect of the modern condition. In his essay on the hotel
lobby, he noted the frequency with which the detective novel takes place in
such temporary spaces,32 which constitute ‘a mere gap that does not even
serve a purpose’.33 Yet Kracauer saw the condition of waiting as potentially
productive in modern, secular societies. He advocated what he called
waiting as a kind of ‘hesitant openness’,34 a refusal to accede either to
religious fundamentalism or to total scepticism: ‘it consists of tense activity
and engaged self-preparation. It is a long path – or better, a leap requiring a
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lengthy approach.’35 This combination of preparation and intensity, of

stepping back the better to leap forward is a good description of the
detective mode exemplified by Blomkvist in his northern retreat; but also
of the dynamic interaction between the time of reading and the time of the
narrative. Detective fictions are self-reflexive to the extent that fictional
detectives offer interesting representations of modes of popular reading.
Blomkvist’s mode is contemplative. Salander is capable of cutting her way
through vast quantities of data to find the answer she is looking for. Robert
Langdon is propelled forwards by events towards a solution that will
provide a universal explanation of a series of baffling enigmas. Each detec-
tive represents a different aspect of the detective narrative, but also offers a
reflection on at least one of its modes of reception.
Thus, the apparently dead time of reading popular fiction involves a
complicated relationship between boredom, waiting and anticipation and
therefore a complicated relationship to the reader’s place in time. Kracauer,
like Adam Phillips, does not see boredom as something from which to
escape. If anything, it is something to be sought out, because it encourages
a productive state of mind. In this way, popular fiction inserts itself into the
interstices of everyday life, occupying its ‘dead’ moments. However, it
would be wrong to say that popular narrative neatly sutures the gaps and
tears of everyday life, stitching it into a seamless garment. Narratives
themselves ‘consist of holes, lacunae, zones of indetermination’.36 Even if
popular texts do not require as much of the reader to complete their
meaning as avant-garde texts, no detective fiction ever fully ties up every
thread. Dissatisfaction, or a feeling of lack, not only prompts the reading of
popular fiction, it is often the result of reading popular fiction, when the
anticipation of a resolution is not delivered by the text itself.
My final example illustrates this point. Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins
detective series (1990–), which has so far seen ten novels and one collection
of seven connected short stories,37 translates the usual dissatisfactions of the
hard-boiled LA detective – cynicism, distrust of women, alcoholism – into
the specific social and political injustices experienced by black Americans in
the decades following the Second World War. Not just a case of adapting a
popular genre to write political fiction that will be widely read, Mosley
picks up on existing elements in detective fiction, which play on and
structure the reader’s dissatisfactions. As Andrew Pepper points out, the
idea of ‘black’ popular fiction is as much a fiction as the notion of ‘race’
itself. ‘Race’ as a cultural construction gains material purchase because
of the histories of slavery, colonialism and racism which continue to
impinge on contemporary social life; but because it is a cultural construc-
tion, popular fiction can play an important role in reinforcing or contesting
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the dominant modes of representation. With a few exceptions, African-

Americans figured as criminals, informants, or prostitutes in early ‘white’
twentieth-century detective fiction.38 African-American men appeared as
violent and dangerous or as weak, submissive cowards against whom the
white detective’s superior masculinity could be proved. Mosley’s Rawlins
mysteries are written against that tradition, but with another purpose as
well: through Rawlins, Mosley writes an alternative history of the United
States in the 1950s and 1960s.
In that context, modes of boredom, waiting, fear and anticipation take on
different more political registers, gesturing, if not actually achieving, a
moment of social transformation.39 Adam Phillips distinguishes between
boredom and waiting by arguing that waiting has an object, even if that
object may not yet be known. Boredom, on the other hand, is a condition in
which we don’t know what we are waiting for, and as a result we don’t
even know that we are waiting at all.40 Easy Rawlins is not bored exactly,
but he suffers from the malaise common amongst detectives (Sherlock
Holmes, for example) when they don’t have a mystery to solve. He becomes
melancholic, without purpose, lacking in energy or drive. This becomes
particularly acute after the apparent death of his closest friend and partner,
‘Mouse’, at the end of the fifth novel in the series, A Little Yellow Dog
(1996). Mouse serves as Easy’s alter ego. He is never melancholic or con-
templative and never without purpose. Without him, Easy seemingly lacks
the will to act.41
In the following novel, Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002), the promise of an
investigation gives Easy energy, instilling an almost hysterical excitement in
the place of Mouse’s capacity for agency. Easy’s ‘boredom’ is linked to his
mourning for Mouse (Phillips describes boredom as the ‘mourning of
everyday life’), but it is given a particular inflection by the way the series
works as a history of postwar African-American experience. If each crime is
in some way a signifier for racial injustice, and each mystery at some level
the mystery of ‘race’, Easy’s time of waiting is also the wait for the end of
that injustice, for emancipation. However, while the reader may know the
history of the civil rights movement and the contradictory outcomes for
different parts of the African-American community, Easy does not. He is in
a state of ‘diffuse restlessness’. He doesn’t know what he is waiting for. He is
in that condition in which Adam Phillips says boredom ‘protects the indi-
vidual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for
something without knowing what it could be’.42 Like the solution to the
mystery, Easy does not recognise that ‘something’ until he sees it, for
example, in the changing attitudes of the police and young people during
the novel set in 1966, Cinnamon Kiss (2005), but these advances are always
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accompanied by the continuing burden of history – the perpetuation of

racism. His desire cannot amount to a desire for justice, it remains more
of a desire for something to desire: the hope for anticipation, rather than the
anticipation of hope.
The seriousness of popular fiction lies in the everyday dissatisfactions of
our lives, not just in what we are denied, but our inability to know what we
want. Its pleasures (the gift of popular fiction) lie not in giving us what we
want, but in providing a space, a time, a condition within the everyday
in which we can consider what we might want, even if we then decide that
what occurs is, after all, a disappointment. This is not emancipation itself,
but such spaces might be the precondition for emancipation. The reader of
Mosley’s novels knows more than Easy Rawlins. As she or he reads about
the Watts riots of 1965 in Little Scarlet (2004), it is with an awareness of
both the political and economic gains made by African-Americans at the
end of the twentieth century as well as the return of civil unrest in Los
Angeles in 1992. The reader now will have a knowledge of Barack Obama’s
campaign (although the most recent Rawlins novel was published before the
Obama presidency), but also of continuing inequality and poverty in US
cities. Popular fiction offers a structure through which such large and
abstract events and ideas can be perceived and understood within the
context of the ordinary events of everyday life.
Against this ‘human dimension’ has to be set the publishing context, which is
within the continuing cultural dominance of the United States in global markets.
Mosley, like Octavia Butler in the sphere of science fiction, and Terry McMillan
in popular women’s fiction,43 has been part of a new market for ‘black’ popular
fiction in the United States, which has had an international impact. In the
Caribbean, where Belinda Johnson traces a long tradition of indigenous middle-
brow fiction, contemporary popular fiction is shaped by ‘two parallel yet
paradoxical forces: the (African)Americanization of Caribbean immigrants
in the United States, and the insistent re-Caribbeanization of those same
immigrants through the globalisation of local popular fiction and local
typologies’.44 Caribbean writers of popular fiction now look to the US
because of the strength of its culture and its publishing market. Johnson
gives the example of Colin Channer, an author who writes about ‘sexy,
well-read black bohemians with glamorous occupations who move easily
between the metropolitan centers of North America and the Caribbean’.45
Channer is successful in both the Caribbean and the US, but as Johnson
points out, ‘without the large and voracious readership of African American
women’, he would not have been published by an American mass-marketing
publishing house, such as Random House, albeit under a niche brand, One
World, ‘created to showcase multicultural . . . fiction’.46
118
In that context, Mosley’s work can be understood in terms of a circulation of

texts and meanings which extend far beyond the space in which the text is
actually read. This circulation takes its place within the history of the cultural
dominance of the hard-boiled thriller, but also within the more recent and
growing international market for African-American fiction. Its impact can be
felt as that market makes its mark on smaller local markets in, for example,
Britain and the Caribbean, where it can promote the growth of a local market
for similar, home-grown fiction, which may then be published by international
publishing houses and ‘go global’. Thus, contemporary popular fiction per-
forms complex negotiations, mapping historical and spatial changes in a
period of rapid globalisation, when local identities are being restructured in
relation to an international culture. Popular fiction draws on existing popular
tropes, but is also engaged in mapping the experience of new social relations.
In Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series, this is most marked in the male detective’s
relationship to women. Every woman Easy meets is judged by their physical
beauty. Many correspond to the stereotype of the femme fatale. They are
untrustworthy, unfaithful, prone to dangerous situations and violent ends.
Disturbingly, they are often murdered after becoming involved with Easy, so
that, while he is not directly responsible, sex and murder are closely associ-
ated in his life. However, in the series the traditional relationship between
male detective and femme fatale is played out against a new set of factors.
Mosley is engaged in an (albeit highly gendered) re-appreciation of the
physical beauty of African-Americans, which takes its cue from black cultural
nationalism. Easy’s culturally encoded tendencies towards violence and his
possessiveness towards his partners is subjected to scrutiny as the series
progresses, which thus benefits from the openness of the serial form described
by John Caughie. Its origins, Easy’s memories suggest, lie in the racial and
sexual violence of the Deep South. The most recent of the series, Blonde
Faith, ends with Easy blacking out after a road accident as he struggles to
come to terms with the fact that he still wants to be with a woman who has
been unfaithful to him. The popular text has to engage with change, although
not necessarily to embrace it as compellingly as Mosley.
Thus, the contemporary reader of popular fiction is engaged in some very
old practices, but under new conditions. The ‘non-serious’ reader is likely to be
moving betwixt and between texts, in print and electronic form. There are new
modes of distraction, the internet, television on demand, a vast reservoir of
images and references. These texts circulate following the flows of inter-
national capital. Popular culture operates within the time of capitalism. But
this time must intersect with the local, proximate experiences of everyday life.
Reading, then, is always a kind of orientation. The time of reading creates the
space for such an orientation, towards place and its greater position in the new
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spatial configurations of a globalised world, but also towards the past and the
future. In many ways, reading popular fiction invents a present for us to be in,
a present of ‘hesitant openness’, in which no matter what our physical situ-
ation, waiting for a bus, trying to get to sleep, or a Mediterranean beach, we
can reflect on where we have come from, and what we might be waiting and
hoping for. Without such narratives, we would be, quite simply, lost.
NOTES
1 Walter Mosley, ‘Gator Green’, in Six Easy Pieces (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2003),
p. 191.
2 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of Califorina Press, 1988), pp. 174–6.
3 Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 4.
4 The painting can be viewed at the Manchester City Gallery website: www.
manchestergalleries.org/the-collections/search-the-collection/mcgweb/objects/
common/webmedia.php?irn=680&size=323x430.
5 Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, ‘Introduction’ to Cavallo and Chartier
(eds.), A History of Reading in the West, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Cambridge:
Polity, 1999), pp. 15–20.
6 Edith Snook, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern
England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 12–15.
7 See David Glover in this volume, Ch. 1.
8 Cavallo and Chartier, A History of Reading, p. 7.
9 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, in The Dialogic
Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: Texas University Press,
1981), p. 73.
10 Cervantes, Don Quixote (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 76.
11 Flint, The Woman Reader, p. 259.
12 For the classic example of this kind of approach see Janice Radway, Reading the
Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1984).
13 See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduci-
bility’, in H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings (eds.), Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 251–83.
14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1962), p. vii.
15 Ibid., p. x.
16 Ibid.
17 I am indebted to Ben Highmore’s chapter ‘Absentminded Media’ for these
distinctions in his Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday (Abingdon: Routledge,
2010), ch. 5.
18 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (University
of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 3.
19 Ibid., p. 10.
20 Ibid., p. 53.
120
21 The first volume was first published in Sweden as Män som hatar kvinnor
(Men Who Hate Women) in 2005.
22 Tzvetan Todorov sees the thriller as a subgenre of the detective novel: ‘The Typology of
the Detective Novel’, in The Poetics of Prose (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 42–52.
See David Glover, ‘The Thriller’, in M. Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Crime Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 135–53.
23 See Nicola Humble and Fred Botting in this volume, Chs. 5 and 9.
24 See John Caughie in this volume, Ch. 3.
25 Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol (London: Bantam Press, 2009), p. 148.
26 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), p. 11.
27 Graeme Gilloch, ‘Urban Optics: Film, Phantasmagoria and the City’, new
formations 61 (Summer 2007).
28 See, for example, Lise in William Gibson’s short story, ‘The Winter Garden’, in
the collection Burning Chrome (London: HarperCollins, 1993).
29 Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, p. 243.
30 Adam Phillips, ‘On Being Bored’, in On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored
(London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 71. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project,
(Cambridge, MA; and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1999), p. 105.
31 Phillips, ‘On Being Bored’, p. 73.
32 Kracauer, ‘The Hotel Lobby’, in Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed.
T. Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 175.
33 The full quotation is ‘The lobby, in which people find themselves vis-à-vis rien, is
a mere gap that does not even serve a purpose served by Ratio [instrumental
reason] (like the conference room or a corporation).’ Ibid., pp. 176–7.
34 Ibid., p. 138.
35 Ibid., p. 139.
36 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, p. 77.
37 Mysteriously, the collection of seven stories is called Six Easy Pieces (London:
Serpent’s Tail, 2003).
38 An important exception was the African-American writer Chester Himes, whose
novels were written in the 1950s and 1960s.
39 In political terms this might be called ‘revolutionary time’. Walter Benjamin gives
it a religious inflection by calling it ‘messianic time’: ‘the present as “now-time”
shot through with splinters of messianic time’: ‘On the Concept of History’,
Selected Writings, vol. iv: 1938–1940, p. 397.
41 For a discussion of the Easy–Mouse relationship in the first four Rawlins novels,
see Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester University
Press, 1998), pp. 167–74.
43 McMillan, in fact, might be seen as a forerunner of ‘chick lit’, having introduced
a more contemporary feel to fiction about women’s lives as early as 1987 with
her novel Mama.
44 Belinda Johnson, Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 140.
45 Ibid., p. 153.
46 Ibid., pp. 155–6.
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7
K AY E M I T C H E L L
Gender and sexuality in popular fiction
Introduction: gender and sexuality in the field of popular fiction

Popular fiction has always had an intricate connection with questions of
gender and sexuality. In order to attend to this connection, it is necessary to
consider not only the content of popular fiction (its representations of
women and men and of sexual relationships and behaviour, for example),
but also its motivations and effects, the readerships it constructs for itself,
the reading practices and communities it institutes, the critical responses to
it, the gendering of particular genres (and of popular culture itself), and the
material contexts of the production and consumption of the popular.
Although there are many texts and topics that could be covered in an essay
such as this one, my necessarily selective focus here will range across:
theories of reading and the perceived effects of popular fiction upon women
readers in particular; the complex ideological work of popular fiction in
constructing our conceptions (and, therefore, shaping our lived experience)
of masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality; the appro-
priation and subversion of popular genres for new or alternative ideological
ends (for example, in 1970s feminist science fiction, and 1950s lesbian
pulp); the popular response to, and elucidation of post-feminism through
chick lit (viewed as a development of contemporary romance fiction) from
the 1990s onwards; and recent developments in the dissemination of popu-
lar narratives of gender and sexual identity and practice due to new tech-
nologies (e.g. internet blogs about female sexuality), which suggest that in
any consideration of popular writing we must continue to attend to the
shifting modes of production, distribution and consumption which put
these texts into circulation and partly determine their effects for us.
Scott McCracken writes that:
Popular fiction, from folk tales and fairy tales to popular ballads to modern
bestsellers, has always provided a structure within which our lives can be
understood. Who we are is never fixed, and in modern societies an embedded
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sense of self is less available than ever before. Popular fiction has the capacity
to provide us with a workable, if temporary, sense of self.1
If identity is always unfixed, the instability of gender and sexual identity in

particular has been a focus of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century
thinking, as traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity are chal-
lenged (not least, but not only, by feminism), as the dominance and natur-
alness of the heterosexual paradigm is similarly tested, and as theories of
gender ‘performativity’, gender crossing and passing, transgenderism, and
sexual fluidity and indeterminacy have emerged. Popular fiction, therefore,
acquires a new resonance as it offers both the means of consolidating or
reinforcing older, more conservative or traditional norms and identities
in the face of these new challenges, and the means of negotiating new
paradigms and helping us to cope with the particular anxieties – and
opportunities – that they might occasion.
Reading popular fiction

There has been a good deal of attention paid to gender in studies of
readership, and in particular to the supposed negative effects of popular
fiction upon the ‘woman reader’. Going back as least as far as the eighteenth
century, anxieties have been expressed (and, more recently, analysed, as a
fascinating cultural phenomenon) about the relationship between popular
fiction (notably ‘feminine’ genres such as Gothic, romance and sensation
fiction) and the female body, senses and sensibility. In such accounts,
popular literature is seen as being either dangerously or subversively
(depending on your standpoint) sexualised and apt to induce the ‘wrong’
types of knowledge, emotion and physical response in impressionable
female readers. Sensation fiction of the 1860s, then, posed a challenge to
contemporary notions of femininity, not only in its female characters (Mary
Braddon’s angelic, doll-like Lady Audley, for example, superficially
embodies the feminine ideal, yet turns out to be a violent, duplicitous
bigamist), but also in the types of ‘unfeminine’ knowledge that it put into
the public sphere and into the minds of its female readers.2 The worldliness
of sensation fiction, which prided itself on its topical appropriation of
stories of crime and passion from the popular press of the time, is an acute
case, but attacks on it formed part of a wider concern, in the Victorian
period, with the types of reading material made available to women. Kate
Flint has noted the paradoxical arguments around the woman reader in this
period: firstly, there were fears that ‘certain texts might corrupt her innocent
mind, hence diminishing her value as a woman’; secondly, it was thought
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‘that she, as a woman, was particularly susceptible to emotionally provoca-

tive material’.3 The hyperbolic style and salacious subject matter of Gothic,
romance and sensation fiction might, therefore, induce women to seek lives
full of excitement and romantic intrigue, might distract them from their
proper (domestic and maternal) duties, might expose them to scandalous
material (compromising their virtue and innocence), might – in the novels’
common structure of anticipation and revelation – unsettle their nerves and
unbalance their emotions.
Although comparable attention is not paid to male readers at the time, such
novels carried with them the taint of a corrupting feminisation and
threatened a kind of class destabilisation too. But for women, the ‘private
act of reading’ raised anxieties about the woman reader’s ‘vulnerability to
textual influence’ and about ‘the potential autonomy of her mind’.4 Whilst
women readers in the early twenty-first century may not be subject to such
concerns, Flint’s discussion highlights the pleasures and the perils that read-
ing holds for women, as an activity both private and public. In her 1984 study
of a community of romance readers, Janice Radway touched upon markedly
similar concerns, noting the guilt (and pleasure) that many women felt in
being lured away from their domestic ‘duties’ by the urge to read mass-
market romance fiction.5 Furthermore, the discussion of ‘textual influence’
is of particular pertinence in any consideration of popular fiction, where the
effects are so often felt to be emotional, physical (the bodily effects of
excessive emotion, such as swooning and fainting) and sensual. Women have
been perceived, historically, as particularly in thrall to their bodies, and thus
particularly susceptible to dangerous levels of identification with the con-
tents of the fictions with which they engage, and therefore men and women
have been seen as differing in their modes of reading and processes of sub-
jectivation, as well as their literary interests and choices.6 According to such a
logic, much popular fiction can be seen as ‘feminine’ in its content (romance,
emotions, the erotic, the domestic, the superficial and the temporarily
modish) and as designed for female readers in its stimulation of fantasy,
particularly of fantasised forms of identification (with heroine or scenario)
as a route to identity-formation. Even as the opposition between emotion and
reason, body and mind, low art and high, has broken down over the years, the
association of popular fiction with women authors and readers has lingered.
The ideological work of popular fiction . . . and its subversion

If masculine genres (thrillers, adventure stories, boy’s own stories, etc.)
place more emphasis on individuation and action than identification and
feeling, they still suggest that masculinity is something that has to be learnt
124
and/or achieved, often through a supreme effort of will, and therefore can
be read as reflections on suitable and unsuitable models of masculine
identity. Masculinity is frequently achieved, in these genres, via an active
exclusion of the homosexual and homoerotic, even whilst forms of homo-
social bonding are encouraged as a means of learning and sustaining manli-
ness. Yet, if the male detective labours to offset the chaos of the external
world and impose his reason upon it, the heroines of popular fiction
frequently labour to contain the chaos and disorder of their own bodies
and emotions. ‘Being a woman’ arguably involves just as much labour as
being a man, in the form of an unceasing self-consciousness to maintain the
facade of perfect femininity, an unceasing performance of that femininity.
In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding satirises the frustrating and relent-
less labour of beauty-maintenance:
Completely exhausted by entire day of date-preparation. Being a woman is

worse than being a farmer – there is so much harvesting and crop-spraying to
be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pum-
iced, skin exfoliated and moisturized, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes
tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised. The whole
performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for
the whole thing to go to seed.7
This extract – indeed, the novel as a whole – provides a good example of

popular fiction’s complex but ambivalent relationship to femininity, which
is, in this novel, both reinforced and critiqued. Fielding draws attention to
the absurdity of such beauty maintenance labours, without offering any real
alternative to them; she ridicules, and yet never quite exorcises, the view of
the female body as a leaky vessel, something abject, requiring containment,
even suppression. In this way, popular fiction can be seen as attending to the
construction of masculinity and femininity in ways that allow both for a
critique of such constructions and for their consolidation.
This ideological work of popular fiction in the construction and
reinforcement of gender and sexual norms has led to divergent readings of
it as, on the one hand, encouraging a kind of ‘false consciousness’ and
participating in the work of gender and sexual regulation and, on the other
hand, as providing opportunities for (at least) the negotiation of normativity
and (at best) its contestation. Considering ‘the instructive character of
popular fiction’, Batsleer et al. note, in their reading of Ian Fleming, that
‘the reader’s assent is being solicited not for some extravagant flight of
fantastic invention but for the deep ideological grain and substance of the
dominant culture’.8 This work of naturalisation and this soliciting of assent
are particularly important in the production and maintenance of gender
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and, crucially, this is ‘work’ that tends to be hidden; popular fiction can
perhaps be seen as bringing it to our attention, however unwittingly.
Is it, then, possible to read popular fictions without succumbing to –
assenting to – their more conservative and restrictive ideological messages?
The false consciousness argument denies the reader an agency (albeit an
agency of refusal) in their reading of popular fiction which feminist critics
have, in recent years, sought to insist upon. In The Feminist Bestseller, as
part of an argument for the inclusion of ‘trash’ (her term) on university
reading lists and for a feminist criticism that avoids the reiteration of
(gendered) literary critical hierarchies, Imelda Whelehan tacitly distinguishes
the ‘feminist reader’ from the common reader (as it were), suggesting that
the latter might still be regarded as prey to false consciousness. A more
optimistic account of the value of popular fiction for many (if not all)
readers comes from McCracken, who argues that bestselling works do not
simply ‘reflect and perpetuate the powerful ideologies that govern our
lives’, they also serve to ‘relate those generalised and impersonal structures
to the personal life and self identity of the reader’.9 Thus, in the case of
patriarchy, viewed as an institutional and impersonal (or supra-personal)
structure, bestsellers aimed at a female readership will attempt not only to
reiterate the terms according to which that institution operates – to ratify
and reify it; they will also seek to speak to the experience of individual
women living within patriarchal societies and to speak to them in ways that
are likely more consolatory than admonitory. For this reason, popular
culture cannot be viewed as simply and straightforwardly regulatory
(although it certainly serves this function, to some degree). McCracken,
then, retains a belief in ‘popular fiction’s ability to gesture to a better world’,
and argues that ‘the potential for transgression contained in popular fiction
creates the possibility for new and different potential selves’.10 These new
selves are made possible for all readers, I would suggest, not only those who
self-define as ‘feminist’.
Feminist authors have, though, exploited this ‘potential for transgression’
still further, by making notable interventions within genre fiction, using
popular fiction as a route to the subversion of gender and sexual ideologies.
Popular fiction is ideally suited to such ideological revisioning primarily
because of the large and diverse audience that it is able to reach and in this
way such appropriations also counteract allegations of feminism’s exclusiv-
ity (which Whelehan, in her appeal to the ‘feminist reader’, is in danger of
reinstating), its preserve as the interest of privileged, middle-class readers
or of those in receipt of a particular kind of education. An embrace
of the ‘popular’ – by author or by critic – can therefore be read as a
democratising impulse.
126
Genre appropriations that involve the ‘regendering of the genre’ in

question are perhaps most notable, and the feminist and/or lesbian rewrit-
ing of crime fiction and science fiction (two nominally ‘masculine’ genres)
in the twentieth century therefore deserves some mention.11 In the work
of writers as diverse as Dorothy L. Sayers, Sue Grafton, Val McDermid,
Mary Wings, Katherine V. Forrest, Sara Paretsky and Stella Duffy, we see
examples of what Sally Munt describes as ‘utopian models of female
agency’, the transgression of social and moral conventions, the foreground-
ing of non-heterosexual relationships (e.g. in Wings, Forrest and Duffy,
all of whose works feature lesbian detectives), ‘an irreverent feminizing
of male authority myths’ and figures (for example Sayers’s Lord Peter
Wimsey), and humorous or parodic renditions of crime fiction motifs and
formulae.12 Appropriations of hard-boiled crime fiction (by black, gay and
feminist writers, for example) play upon the idea of the detective as social
and institutional outsider, sometimes achieving their subversion of the
genre via the simplest method – that of inverting the race, gender or
sexuality of the detective. However, lesbian and feminist rewritings of crime
fiction often involve deliberate challenges to the basic tenets of (masculine)
crime writing that are more complex than a simple reversal of roles,
for example by presenting female detectives who are very far from the
‘controlled centre surrounded by chaos’ described by Munt, indeed who
partake of that chaos and whose personal lives cannot be kept absolutely
distinct from the cases they are working (for example, Saz Martin in
Duffy’s Beneath the Blonde, 1997, or Harriet Vane in Sayers’s Gaudy
Night, 1935).13
If women writers (feminist or otherwise) remain buoyant within the field
of crime fiction, the feminist appropriation of science fiction, by contrast,
occupies a quite fleeting position in the history of that genre, consisting of
novels produced by Ursula Le Guin, Sally Miller Gearhart, Joanne Russ and
Marge Piercy (amongst others) during the 1970s (and rarely since). The
advantage of popular literature with a futuristic or alternative-world setting
is that it can reveal that what we take as ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ is in fact
cultural, contingent, a human construction and could be otherwise, in some
other possible world. This has been particularly important for feminism. If
it is the function of ideology to naturalise (and institutionalise) a given
reality (e.g. that patriarchal ‘reality’ where men are ‘naturally’ superior,
more rational, stronger, more dominant than women), then a novel set in
a future or alternative world can reveal this (or any) reality to be a construc-
tion by positing some other, quite different reality (e.g. a reality in which
women are the dominant sex or, more radically, a reality in which we have
moved beyond a binary understanding of gender). Utopian and dystopian
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novels show a society or culture that has undergone radical alteration –

what remains or survives is therefore presented as ‘natural’ or ‘essential’.
However, the disadvantage of the very politically engaged feminist sf of
the 1970s is that, like much popular fiction and nearly all sf, it is so much of
its time that much of it (with the exception of Piercy and Russ) is now out
of print and critically neglected. A similar situation obtains with the (sub)
genre that I want to turn to next – lesbian pulp fiction – and the case of pulp
reveals as well that the ideological work of popular fiction and its subver-
sion are perhaps not as straightforward as might be suggested by my
discussion of the feminist appropriation of genre fiction.
Sexuality in popular fiction: the case of 1950s lesbian pulp fiction

1950s America witnessed a quite unprecedented boom in writing, both
fictional and non-fictional, and of a definitively mass-market nature, about
homosexuality. Yet such texts were, until relatively recently, excluded from
official histories of gay and lesbian literature and were shunned both by
queer critics (for their blatant homophobia and sexual stereotyping) and by
literary critics (for their trashy, lowbrow aesthetic). ‘Queer pulp’, as it has
come to be called,14 emerged as part of the expansion of cheap paperback
publishing (mostly of genre fiction) during the war years and in the immedi-
ate postwar period. By the 1950s, pulp increasingly concerned itself with
prominent social and political anxieties about the roles and status of
women, teenage delinquency, homosexuality, communism and other per-
ceived threats from within and without. Lee Server has written of this as ‘a
brief but gloriously subversive era in the history of American publishing’,
adding that ‘These cheap, pocket-sized editions came wrapped in lurid
cover art and screaming headlines, hyping stories about crime, lust, and
violence.’15 I’ll address the question of how ‘subversive’ these books were –
particularly as regards their depiction of homosexuality – in due course.
Pulp novels were so named because of the cheap, wood-pulp paper on
which they were printed; they were published straight into paperback and
were sold in drugstores, train stations, bus depots and at news-stands, for as
little as twenty-five cents; the small-format, lightweight books were easy to
mail, distribute, carry – and dispose of; and their lurid covers proclaimed
the titillating nature of their content but the images (often of half-undressed
women) were countered by moralising taglines which promised the ‘truth’
of the information contained within, and its function as social corrective.
Although initially and primarily an American phenomenon, pulp gradually
infiltrated the UK and was influential upon the adult-oriented popular
fiction titles of the 1960s.16 The earliest genres of pulp, predominantly
128
crime fiction and science fiction, and sometimes editions of already pub-
lished novels rather than originals, date from the 1930s, but the 1950s are
the heyday of pulp and the ‘lesbian pulp fiction’ that I’m going to discuss
here is pretty much confined to the period 1950–65.
Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks (1950) – ‘the frank autobiography of
a French girl soldier’, as its tagline proclaims – was one of the first books to
be published in the new paperback format by Fawcett Gold Medal Press and
is generally held to be the first lesbian pulp novel. It sold 1 million copies in
the first year of publication, more than 3 million in total before going out of
print. (It came back into print in 2005 with CUNY’s Feminist Press as part
of their ‘femmes fatales’ series.) In the light of its success, a young jobbing
journalist, Marijane Meaker, was asked by editor Dick Carroll at Fawcett to
write a novel about lesbian affairs between college girls. The result was
Spring Fire (1952) (‘A story once told in whispers now frankly, honestly
written’). Carroll informed Meaker that the book had to have an unhappy
ending (e.g. ‘the lesbian going crazy’) or copies of the book ‘would be
seized by the Post Office as obscene’, telling her, ‘you cannot make homo-
sexuality attractive. No happy ending’, and insisting that ‘your main
character can’t decide she’s not strong enough to live that life. She has to
reject it knowing that it’s wrong.’17 Meaker followed these instructions
(one character decides she’s not gay, the other ends up in a mental asylum),
and acknowledged that the book was meant to be a titillating read for
heterosexual men, yet she says: ‘when it came out I got just hundreds of
letters, boxes of them, all from women, gay women. It took them all
by surprise, this big audience out there.’18 The first printing sold more than
1.4 million copies, whilst Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out was the second
bestselling paperback of 1957.19 Hundreds of lesbian pulp titles were
produced through the 1950s and ’60s.
Although there was no single formula, lesbian pulp novels were more or
less formulaic, sharing a number of points in common, in their settings,
plots and characterisation, for example: all-female settings (college
campuses/dormitories, summer camps, career girls sharing city apartments);
stereotypical characters such as the butch (swaggering, predatory, preying
on the more feminine and often younger girl, wearing trousers and hanging
out in bars), and the femme (with her overdone femininity, voluptuous, a
femme fatale figure, or weak, ditzy and whining); there was a focus on the
bar scene, lesbian subculture, alcoholism, illegal or illicit parties, usually
with an urban setting (notably Greenwich Village); and usually there were
unhappy endings, where the lesbian characters were ‘converted’ to hetero-
sexuality (particularly the femmes), or where they ended up miserable,
alcoholic, suicidal or insane. So the surface ‘message’ was often that
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lesbianism was destructive, or a kind of sickness, and the frequently

titillating content was clearly designed for a male heterosexual audience.
However, the best novels (such as Bannon’s Beebo Brinker series) empha-
sised the possibility of pleasure and happiness in relationships between
women and worked towards more optimistic conclusions, whilst still stress-
ing the difficulty that the lesbian encounters living in an intolerant society.
Yvonne Keller in fact makes a distinction between what she calls ‘pro-
lesbian’ pulps (Bannon, Packer, Torres, Valerie Taylor, Paula Christian and
Della Martin) and ‘virile adventures’. ‘Pro-lesbian’ pulps are ‘women-
centred, often told from a woman’s point of view, dominated by a love
story, without obviously extraneous sex scenes, and with well-developed
characters’; these were ‘books with a female protagonist . . . uniformly
written by women, or at least by authors who used female pseudonyms’.20
By contrast, ‘virile adventures’ were male-authored, aimed at a male reader,
and typically had ‘more sex scenes and a male protagonist’.21 This is
an overly simplistic distinction, however, because even the allegedly ‘pro-
lesbian’ pulps contain decidedly mixed and contradictory messages about
lesbianism, and the use of a female pseudonym can hardly be held to
identify a ‘pro-lesbian’ text, as many pulp authors used gender-concealing
pseudonyms. To suggest that such novels can be either straightforwardly
‘pro’ or ‘anti’ lesbian is to elide the (ideological and material) conditions of
their production, dissemination and reception, and to ignore their individ-
ual, internal, incoherence.
Ultimately this distinction appears to be a comment on quality, as Keller
suggests that ‘pro-lesbian’ is roughly equivalent to Barbara Grier’s ‘good
titles’ in the ‘Lesbiana’ review sections of (1950s lesbian magazine) The
Ladder, whilst ‘virile adventures’ equate to what Grier here titles ‘trash’.22
It’s worth noting, in passing, this value system in microcosm: many people
would view all pulp as ‘trash’, yet it is clear, first, that lesbian readers in the
1950s did discriminate (as lesbian critics do now in reviewing the history of
pulp) and secondly, that pulp novels were discussed and exchanged by
lesbian readers and therefore were instrumental in building communities
and identities, even if only unifying readers in their dislike of the ‘trashy’
titles. This suggests that reception does alter, must alter, the way we read the
books. It suggests that the reading of popular fiction requires agency and
discernment on the part of the reader, who may choose to read ‘resistantly’ or
may appropriate for her own ends (desire, identity-formation, community-
formation, visibility) representations that might otherwise be viewed as
discriminatory or condemnatory. Kate Millett, writing of her own dalliance
with pulp novels, claims that she was ‘ashamed of them as writing, the
treacle of their fantasy, the cliché of their predicament’, yet indicates their
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value to her in also describing them as ‘the only blooms in the desert’.23
Katherine V. Forrest, with a little more hyperbole (befitting the pulp subject),
remembers her first purchase of a pulp novel:
Overwhelming need led me to walk a gauntlet of fear up to the cash register.

Fear so intense that I remember nothing more, only that I stumbled out of the
store in possession of what I knew I must have, a book as necessary as air . . . It
opened the door to my soul and told me who I was. It led me to other books
that told me who some of us were, and how some of us lived.24
If both Millett and Forrest’s descriptions reveal the shame and anxiety
associated with pulp (and, we might note, with much popular, sensationalist
fiction and much fiction dealing with the representation of the erotic), they
also insist upon precisely those issues of identity, community and pleasure
that are central to any discussion of popular fiction and gender and
sexuality.
Pulp novels ostensibly function as agents of social, moral and political
regulation, policing female sexual behaviour and producing female sexual
identity in various ways, working towards the re-establishment of sexual
and social order. In these novels, female promiscuity is punishable, lesbian-
ism (if not overcome or rejected by the end of the novel) brings alcoholism,
misery or suicide and is frequently linked to criminality. Pulps detail the
consequences of overt, active and/or ‘deviant’ female sexuality, figuring that
sexuality as both symptom and cause of social and moral degeneration;
indeed the issue here is precisely agency – active (as opposed to passive,
responsive) female sexuality, just is ‘deviant’, even if heterosexual. Specific
anxieties (about sex outside marriage and the increasing visibility of les-
bianism, for example) can be seen as part of a more general anxiety about
female roles and identities in the 1950s. ‘College girls’ and ‘career girls’
figure frequently in these novels, suggesting a concern both with the move-
ment of women into the public sphere and with the dangers of all-female
communities. A key problem is that of influence (an influence that works by
proximity or contiguity). This can be the influencing of women by other
women – examples include the butch college lesbian who preys upon her
weak but otherwise ‘normal’ roommate, found in Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl
Out and Vin Packer’s Spring Fire or the sexually experienced older woman
who leads astray a naı̈ve girl, which happens in Torres’s Women’s Barracks;
but fears about influence also concern the effect of woman’s exposure to the
public world (her innate corruptibility), and the influence of woman upon
that public world (the feminisation of the public sphere). Indeed, in one
non-fiction pulp work of 1961, lesbianism is referred to as an ‘infection’,
and in a chapter titled ‘The Infection Spreads’ it is suggested that ‘the
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current increase in lesbianism is attributed by some to cultural defeminiza-

tion’ – i.e. by women taking on male roles and jobs, moving into the public
sphere and so becoming more ‘masculine’ – but implicit in that claim is the
fear that what will take place is actually a feminisation of the hitherto
masculine public sphere.25
However, pulp’s attempts at regulation were not (and are not) uniformly
successful. In fact, I would suggest, pulp fiction necessarily fails in its
attempt to re-impose order upon a disorderly world (and disorderly
women), and always has done. Pulps attempt their work of regulation by
foregrounding deviance, perversion and social/sexual disorder and this
deviance is not easily quelled by their morally conservative and censorious
endings. Their very use of excess, as a tool of shock and titillation, precludes
this. This excess appears at the level of language, plot, characterisation and
appearance – in the lurid descriptions, the garish covers, the melodramatic
plotting, and the ‘heart-pounding’ effects that form part of the desired and
necessary response to pulp. In particular, female sexuality itself is treated as
excessive, as something essentially uncontainable, ungovernable. This is a
negative (even misogynistic) characterisation, but also in some senses a self-
defeating one.
Again, this serves as a counter to the overly simplistic ‘false conscious-
ness’ argument, suggesting that popular fiction is capable of producing
dissonant effects, even when the surface message is dogmatically conserva-
tive. If this is most evident in the kinds of ‘resistant’ readings that I have
already hinted at, it is present also in the content of the books themselves.
Thus, although lesbian pulp tends to present stereotypical examples of the
predatory butch preying on the feminine girl who is vulnerable to her
attentions, yet it just as often subverts these roles, suggesting that such
‘natures’ (as they are presented) are similarly liable to overstep their own
boundaries. Witness, for example, Venus in Beebo Brinker, Leda in Spring
Fire and Claude in Women’s Barracks: all are described as goddesses and
paragons of femininity (Claude is ‘a lady such as one saw in films’,26 Leda is
repeatedly referred to as the ‘queen’ of the sorority, Venus is a renowned and
voluptuous Hollywood star), yet all actively desire other women.27 Simi-
larly, although Laura succumbs to the attentions of the more masculine and
experienced Beth in Odd Girl Out, it is Beth who ultimately renounces
homosexuality (at least for the time being) and marries, whilst Laura is
confirmed in her lesbianism and (subsequently) heads for Greenwich
Village.
Ann Bannon is unusual amongst pulp authors in allowing her characters
an occasional happy ending, even having one aver, at the end of Beebo
Brinker, that ‘women have a special knack for loving . . . There’s a
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tenderness, an instinctive sympathy, between two women when their love is

right . . . it’s very rare in any kind of love. But it comes near perfection
between women.’28 This is not to say, however, that such books (even
Bannon’s) are straightforwardly or uncomplicatedly ‘subversive’ – indeed,
I want to resist too facile an opposition between a ‘false consciousness’
reading and a ‘subversive’ reading. In the case of Bannon’s endings, then,
consider Diane Hamer’s assertion that:
In Bannon’s novels, momentary happiness is always followed by further

conflict, and the stories never really end . . . What distinguishes Bannon stories
from conventional romance (apart from the gender of her characters) is the
fact that here, the nature of desire, restless and insatiable, works against this
compulsory closure. Instead of the perhaps more comforting endings conven-
tional romance offers its readers, Bannon has captured accurately the contra-
dictory experience of sexuality and desire in her recognition that sexual desire
(heterosexual or lesbian) often works against the stability of monogamous
coupling. The resolution that such coupling promises is only ever partial, and
exists primarily in fantasy.29
This can be read as confirming Stacey and Pearce’s claim that, in lesbian
romance, ‘obstacles are shown to be integral to romance: they are not
something to be magically “disappeared” through consummation/
resolution’.30 Nevertheless, the possibility of some resolution of conflict,
doubt or indecision, however temporary, partial and fantasised, indicates
the value of popular texts – even those texts that simultaneously encode
quite conservative and punitive messages. I will leave open the question of
whether popular fictions concerned with sexuality – whether straight or
gay – are always marked, in their structural and ideological inconsistencies,
by ‘the nature of desire, restless and insatiable’, or whether it is such fictions
that are responsible for producing this particular understanding of desire as,
necessarily, uncontainable, uncontrollable, liable to wander. This ultimate
refusal of closure/satiation of desire (including readerly desire) always
leaves open the possibility of another story and, therefore, of continuing
consumption; this explains, in part, popular fiction’s investment in seriality.
Although pulp novels are defined by their (low) status as consumer
artifacts, possibilities for subversion of the messages (and regulatory lean-
ings) of pulp lie also in its modes of distribution. Pulps resisted regulation
through their sheer availability: they were sold via drugstores and news-
stands, rather than conventional bookshops; and by popular presses (such
as Fawcett, Beacon and Midwood) which were not subject to the controls of
more ‘literary’ publishing houses. They sold in huge numbers, quickly, and
went out of print just as quickly. Sales were not tracked, so it is difficult to
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know who exactly read pulp; the books were also passed from reader to
reader, or simply disposed of. Responding to Lee Server’s assertion that the
pulp publishing boom of the 50s was ‘subversive’,31 Christopher Nealon
writes that ‘pulp fiction seemed to open the door to unregulated consump-
tion of literary materials, out of reach – briefly, indeed – of censors, but
readily available to readers’.32 Again, the implied excess of this is troubling:
consumption is encouraged in the capitalist society in which these books are
exchanged, but ‘unregulated consumption’ suggests the inbuilt flaws of that
economy and reveals how pulp fiction, as a form of popular culture, is both
the most paradigmatic expression of the market and the moment of its
possible undoing.
Consumerism, technology and contemporary popular fictions for women

Pulps can be read as a form of romance fiction, and their recent recuper-
ation by queer critics mirrors the earlier feminist attempts by Radway,
Radford, Stacey and Pearce, and Modleski – to provide a serious critical
investigation of the importance of romance fiction for women readers,
following a second-wave castigation of romance as one of the tools and
veils of patriarchy.33 If mass-market romance fiction of the Mills and Boon/
Harlequin variety has, in the last couple of decades, become more forward-
looking and complex in its depiction of educated and ambitious heroines
and its inclusion of more explicit sexual material, it has perhaps had to
evolve in order to compete with its more ‘respectable’ offshoot, chick lit. In
turn, chick lit – of which Bridget Jones’s Diary is often held to be a
progenitor – has received increasing, and increasingly positive (or at least
nuanced) critical attention from feminist critics such as Imelda Whelehan,
Suzanne Ferris and Clare Hanson.
The feminist critical assessment of chick lit continues, but I want to
conclude by turning to the even more recent (post-2000) emergence/consoli-
dation of a popular subgenre, which can be seen as the latest development of
the form, content and materiality of romance fiction: popular erotic
memoirs by women and sex blogs (from which many of them are derived).
I began this essay by citing McCracken’s claims about the role of popular
fiction in identity formation, which included the assertion that ‘in modern
societies an embedded sense of self is less available than ever before’; in
the light of this, it is perhaps not surprising that popular narratives
around sexuality in particular have, in recent years, adopted an ever more
confessional tone and/or a memoir, or memoir-like, format. The dramatic
and quite unexpected success of Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of
Catherine M (2001), in particular,34 marked the emergence of an apparently
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new subgenre: the women’s popular erotic memoir. Whilst Millet’s work
undoubtedly had literary (if not, indeed, philosophical) pretensions (and is
best read alongside continental antecedents such as Pauline Réage, Anais
Nin, Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade), the works that publishers
have rushed into print to capitalise on Millet’s success have been
unashamedly mass-market, and have served to blur the distinction between
memoir and fiction (and, for that matter, between reality and fantasy).
Recent examples include: the two ‘Belle de Jour’ books, The Intimate
Adventures of a London Call Girl (2005) and The Further Adventures of
a London Call Girl (2007); Abby Lee, Girl With a One-Track Mind (2006)
and its follow-up, Girl With a One-Track Mind: Exposed (2010); Stephanie
Klein, Straight Up and Dirty (2007); Melissa P, One Hundred Strokes of
the Brush Before Bed (2004); Suzanne Portnoy, The Butcher, the Baker, the
Candlestick Maker: An Erotic Memoir (2006); Tracy Quan’s Manhattan
Call Girl series of novels (2005–8), and many more besides.
These titles are notable: first, for their interchangeability (regardless of
whether they claim to be true-life accounts or novels) and particularly the
interchangeability of their packaging (shades of pink, with animated,
slightly suggestive images of women); secondly, for their close relationship
to chick lit (evident, again, in their packaging, but also in the deployment of
similar motifs and concerns – romance, consumerism, ‘having it all’, the
legacies of feminism/the meanings of post-feminism);35 thirdly, for their
uneasy conflation of ‘erotic memoir’ and ‘prostitute narrative’ motifs; and
fourthly, for the fact that many of them began life as blogs (e.g. Belle de
Jour, Lee and Klein). This last point suggests that the internet has a hugely
important role to play in the construction and dissemination of popular
narratives about sexuality in the twenty-first century, and there are various
reasons for this: it facilitates the instant, widespread and notionally ‘free’
distribution of erotic material;36 it allows for author and reader anonymity
(which has been particularly important within communities and societies
where taboos remain around the discussion of female sexuality, homosexu-
ality, or sexuality generally), thus constituting a ‘safe’ space for sexual self-
expression; it encourages confession and links this, in a very un-Foucauldian
way, to identity;37 it creates (virtual) networks and communities (and
remember that communities of exchange have always been vital for the
success of popular fiction, particular for genres such as romance); ‘word of
mouth’ is here magnified, exponentially.
Feona Attwood argues that the popularity of such blogs and ‘blooks’ (as
the blogs-turned-books have become known) amongst female authors and
readers ‘can . . . be linked to the longstanding identification of diaries and
other autobiographical forms of writing as women’s genres. More generally,
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talk about personal and intimate issues is associated with women and with
women’s media such as the talk show, romantic novels and women’s maga-
zines.’38 Whilst this, rightly, places blogs and blooks within a particular
popular cultural tradition (and Attwood proceeds to read Belle de Jour and
Abby Lee in relation to Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’s Diary), it fails
to challenge either these kinds of gendered associations or the inherent
validity of sexual confession and its supposed, constitutive links to identity.
In addition, although affirmative readings of these memoirs tend to high-
light the emphasis on female pleasure and (sexual) agency, that is an
emphasis that is often undermined by the content of the texts themselves.
Thus, Belle’s own pleasure is not an issue in most of her sexual encounters as
she is (unsurprisingly) more concerned with pleasing the client – she
acknowledges that ‘this is a customer service position, not a self-fulfilment
odyssey’ and elaborates that ‘being desired is fun’;39 following another
professional encounter, she laments that, ‘It made me feel like unturned
clay must, wanting to form into something, some fantasy, but not being
allowed’, and yet this desire to form into someone else’s fantasy is miscon-
strued, in the popular and media response to the books, as female sexual
liberation.40 In her personal life, Belle’s description of her ‘enjoyment’ in her
first sexual encounter with a particular man boils down to the fact that
‘Here was a man, finally, who knew what he wanted and, better still, knew
what to do to get it’;41 of one abusive relationship, she claims, ‘I couldn’t
imagine myself in this man’s arms so much as on the end of his fist.’42 Abby
Lee’s sexual experiences are more convincingly pleasurable (not least
because she’s not working in prostitution), but she still agonises, endlessly,
over the question of whether her sexual desires (which are actually fairly
conventional and heterosexual, albeit non-monogamous, casual and active)
make her a ‘freak’.43
Whilst the original blogs from which these books derive might seem to
operate outside the exigencies of the market, they are centrally concerned
with consumption, and indeed reveal the increasing difficulty of discussing
sex and sexuality – in a popular arena – without employing the language of
commerce, consumerism and quantity.44 Even if not rapidly appropriated
by and assimilated into the commercial sphere through print publication,
they model a neo-liberal conception of sexuality as consumption, possession
and individualism: as Belle asserts, disconcertingly, ‘Like the Army, I have
fun and get paid to do it. Sometimes it’s not as fun but I always get
paid.’45 As such they constitute one more example of the movement of
capitalism into the sphere of personal life, whilst also suggesting the con-
tinuing, compromised attempts of popular culture to account for those still
tricky subjects of female sexual agency and pleasure. As self-consciously
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‘post-feminist’ texts, they also try – but generally fail – to be post-romance

(both Abby Lee and Belle, in their first books, have a significant, typically
obstacle-strewn relationship in addition to their more casual, or paid, sexual
encounters) and Lee in particular presents herself as a feminist, suggesting
that she is continuing her mother’s work of sexual liberation: ‘Here was her
daughter, brought up to respect her own sexuality and be proud of her
desires and wants, being her own woman and keeping up the good work
she’d fought and struggled for in the Sixties.’46
It’s useful to read such texts in relation to earlier popular forays into
erotic writing by and for women such as Virgin’s Black Lace novels: whilst
such narratives are generally sold on the basis of their emancipatory sexual
potential, whilst they foreground and appear to celebrate female sexuality,
they further reify the position of the woman reader as a consumer and the
status of sex as an object of consumption, one amongst many. Indeed,
whether it is sex itself or merely the sexual confession that is being sold,
the new erotic memoirs bear out Ariel Levy’s assessment of ‘raunch culture’
as ‘essentially commercial’ rather than ‘essentially progressive’.47
Despite – or even because of – this, the books are extremely important as
sociological documents, revealing the effects of both capitalism and neo-
liberalism for our understanding of sexuality, the continued anxieties about
female sexuality (and its discussion/representation within the public
sphere), the conflicted legacies of second-wave feminism, and the continued
fascination of popular cultural forms with sex, gender and sexuality.
Arguably, the ideological work of popular fiction which has formed such
a significant part of my discussion here reaches its apogee in these kinds of
texts, with both Intimate Adventures and Girl With a One-Track Mind
offering ‘guides’ to sexual behaviour for the (female) reader. If such guides
adopt and adapt a savvy Cosmo-language of liberation and pleasure-
seeking, they also reveal that popular narratives that treat of gender identity
and sexual behaviour will always incline towards the instructive and the
regulatory, and – regardless of their increasing explicitness – they preclude
any simple reading of the development of popular narratives of gender and
sexuality in the last century and a half as a progressive liberalisation.
Popular fiction has always sought to accomplish apparently contradictory
tasks in its treatment of gender and sexuality: to explore and yet contain –
even suppress – anxieties about changing gender roles and taboo or ‘devi-
ant’ sexual proclivities; to titillate readers who are simultaneously conserva-
tive and prurient, without offending or alienating them; to entertain and
divert a ‘mass’ audience, ensuring accessibility, whilst speaking to quite
personal, private and idiosyncratic desires and fears; to emphasise its
grounding in reality, whilst offering fantasy, escapism. Despite the
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increasing academic attention paid to various kinds of genre fiction and

popular culture (to which this collection attests), ‘the popular’ continues to
be disparaged for reasons and in terms that are notably gendered; neverthe-
less, this disparagement itself reveals the importance of the popular cultural
arena as both a key source of evidence in the study of gender and sexuality,
and a crucial space for the elaboration and enactment of the fantasies which
structure and complicate our own experiences of being gendered, desiring
individuals in the world.
NOTES
1 Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester University Press,
1998), p. 2.
2 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) (Hertfordshire: Words-
worth Editions, 1997).
3 Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 22.
4 Ibid., p. 4.
5 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Litera-
ture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
6 Ibid.
7 Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary (London: Picador, 1996), p. 30.
8 Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke and Chris Weedon, Rewriting
English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 75.
9 McCracken, Pulp, pp. 44–5.
10 Ibid., p. 13.
11 See Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford University Press,
2005), ch. 6, ‘Regendering the Genre’.
12 Sally Munt, Murder by the Book: Feminism and the Crime Novel (London:
Routledge, 1994), pp. 6–7.
13 Ibid., p. 1.
14 See, for example, Susan Stryker’s book Queer Pulp (San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 2001), one of the earliest overviews of pulp, although mainly notable for
its extensive illustrations.
15 Lee Server, Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paper-
back, 1945–1955 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994), p. 9.
16 Examples of non-US pulp include Shirley Verel, The Dark Side of Venus (1962)
(British), and Anna Elisabet Weirauch, Of Love Forbidden (1958) (German –
also published under the title, The Scorpion).
17 Quoted in Server, Over My Dead Body, p. 55.
18 Ibid.
19 Bannon is now feted as the queen of pulp and still does lecture tours and readings
in the US, although at the time she was an unhappy housewife, making illicit trips
to Greenwich Village and then writing fiction based on her experiences there.
20 Yvonne Keller, ‘“Was it Right to Love her Brother’s Wife So Passionately?”:
Lesbian Pulp Novels and US Lesbian Identity, 1950–1965’, American Quarterly
57:2 (2005): 390–1.
21 Ibid., p. 390.
138
22 Ibid., p. 395.
23 Kate Millett, Flying (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1974), p. 202.
24 Katherine V. Forrest, ‘Introduction’, in Lesbian Pulp Fiction anthology (San
Francisco: Cleis Press, 2005), p. ix.
25 Carlson Wade, The Troubled Sex (New York: Beacon Envoy, 1961), p. 33.
26 Tereska Torres, Women’s Barracks (1950) (New York: Feminist Press, 2005),
p. 30.
27 Vin Packer, Spring Fire (1952) (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004); Ann Bannon,
Beebo Brinker (1962) (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2001).
28 Bannon, Beebo Brinker, p. 232.
29 Diane Hamer, ‘I Am a Woman’, in Mark Lilly (ed.), Lesbian and Gay Writing:
An Anthology of Critical Essays (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990),
p. 69.
30 Jackie Stacey and Lynne Pearce (eds.), Romance Revisited (London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1995), p. 24.
31 Server, Over My Dead Body, p. 9.
32 Christopher Nealon, ‘Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction’,
New Literary History 31 (2000): 748.
33 For the important, more positive feminist, accounts of romance, see: Radway,
Reading the Romance; Jean Radford (ed.), The Progress of Romance: The
Politics of Popular Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); Stacey
and Pearce (eds.), Romance Revisited; Lynne Pearce, Fatal Attractions (London:
Pluto, 1998) and Romance Writing (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Tania Modleski,
Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London:
Methuen, 1982). For second-wave attacks on romance, see Kate Millett, Sexual
Politics (1969); Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1970).
34 The Sexual Life of Catherine M sold more than 400,000 copies in France, and
has been translated into twenty-six languages; in the UK it became Serpent’s
Tail’s biggest seller, and they proceeded to have significant success with Melissa
P’s 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (2004) (an international bestseller) and
Emily Maguire’s Taming the Beast (2005).
35 The connection to chick lit is reinforced by reviews of Belle de Jour which
describe her as ‘a top shelf Bridget Jones’ (Daily Mail) and ‘Bridget Jones in a
brothel’ (Heat Magazine).
36 Erotic, rather than pornographic, although the distinction is, admittedly, a
contested one – the difference here is perhaps that you have to pay for
pornography!
37 Such blogs can be seen as an extension of those social networking sites which
seek to express and/or consolidate identity through the enumeration of tastes – in
music, film, etc; in the ‘sex blogs’, it is sexual tastes and proclivities which are
seen as defining the individual or as constituting the ‘truth’ of identity, particu-
larly as far as women are concerned.
38 Feona Attwood, ‘Intimate Adventures: Sex Blogs, Sex “Blooks” and Women’s
Sexual Narration’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 12:1 (2009): 6.
39 Belle de Jour, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (London: Orion,
2005), p. 94.
40 Ibid., p. 212.
41 Ibid., p. 67.
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42 Ibid.
43 Abby Lee, Girl with a One-Track Mind (London: Ebury Press, 2006), p. vii.
44 For alternatives to the more commercially minded Belle and Girl, see, for
example, the (recently discontinued) ‘Bitchy Jones’ blog at http://bitchyjones.
wordpress.com/, which puts great stress on the fact that Bitchy is not selling
sexual services (‘I do not do dominatrixing for money’) or writing for money. See
also Kitty Stryker’s blog, Purrversatility, where she describes herself as a queer
professional domme, and muses on her experiences and relationships; although
she is selling her services (on another site), she presents herself as ‘alternative’ in
her sexuality and in her politics.
45 Belle de Jour, Intimate Adventures, p. 102.
46 Lee, Girl With a One-Track Mind, p. 217.
47 Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
(London: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 29.
140
8
ERIN A. SMITH
Pulp sensations
A 1933 article entitled ‘The Pulps: Day Dreams for the Masses’ introduced
Vanity Fair’s upscale readers to the vast literary underworld of pulp maga-
zines. The exposé called writers of pulp fiction ‘hacks’, implied their readers
were only marginally literate, and characterised the magazines themselves
as ‘gaudy, blatant, banal’, representing ‘the incursion of the Machine Age
into the art of tale-telling’.1 These were all familiar charges. Pulp fiction was
an often sensational, mass-produced literature that had appeared in the
pages of pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. The name, ‘pulp fiction’, comes from the cheap,
wood-pulp paper on which these stories were printed. Descendants of
nineteenth-century dime novels, pulp magazines and paperback originals
were frequently viewed as ‘trash’ – cheap, disposable and lacking in literary
quality. Rather than evoking a reader’s refined, higher feelings, these stories
were charged with appealing to baser, corporeal emotions. These reputed
moral and aesthetic failings aside, however, pulp fiction has warranted
increasing interest in the last twenty years from scholars who see it as an
avenue for investigating popular worldviews and for tracking the complex
encounter between ordinary people and commercial culture.
Dime novels
From the 1840s to the 1890s, publishers of dime novels, story papers and
cheap libraries in the USA like Frank Tousey, George Munro, Beadle &
Adams and Street & Smith pioneered the sale of cheap, mass-produced
sensation fiction to the urban, working classes. Sold for a nickel or a dime,
they featured tales of adventure on the frontier, exposés of the crime and
corruption of the cities, accounts of great strikes, narratives of bandits and
outlaws, stories of honest mechanic heroes and tales of virtuous working
girls who marry millionaires. Although there were a few stars like George
Lippard, Ned Buntline (creator of Buffalo Bill), Edward Wheeler (creator of
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Deadwood Dick), Laura Jean Libbey and E. D. E. N. Southworth, most of

this blatantly commercial fiction was written by unknown authors paid by
the word. Often several anonymous writers laboured under a single author’s
name – ‘Bertha M. Clay’ or ‘Old Sleuth’ – that was owned by the publisher.
Writers prided themselves on speed, quantity and meeting the demands of
the formula.2 This world of cheap sensation fiction was utterly separate
from the middle-class world of sentimental fiction and the highbrow litera-
ture now taught in college classrooms. Public libraries would not carry dime
novels; ‘respectable’ magazines condemned them as purely sensational; and
upper-class societies for the prevention of vice prosecuted their publishers.
In his major study, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class
Culture in America (1987), Michael Denning revolutionised our under-
standing of this cheap sensation fiction by emphasising its class politics.
Dime novels targeted readers who were disproportionately young, working
class and immigrant. Arguing that these sensation stories were neither sheer
manipulation of working-class readers nor an authentic expression of their
culture, Denning characterises dime novels as sites of cultural struggle.
Juxtaposing an allegorical or typological way of reading characteristic of
subordinate classes to established middle-class, ‘novelistic’ ways of reading,
Denning reveals the ‘mechanic accents’ with which working-class readers
inflected the ambiguous plots and characters of dime novels. To ‘read
allegorically’ is to interpret characters not so much as unique, realistically
depicted individuals, but rather as representatives of wider social forces or
groups who are part of a grand narrative of social and political emancipa-
tion. For popular readers, then, these stories were allegories celebrating an
artisan republicanism that fused political symbols of democracy with the
traditions of craft labour.3
Dime novels had links to other forms of popular culture that made up a
broader culture of sensation – tabloid journalism, popular stage melo-
dramas and (later) early cinema. First, dime-novel plots were often ‘ripped
from the headlines’. George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk
Hall (1845) was based on a celebrated murder case in Philadelphia in 1842.
Numerous dime novels were written about a series of gruesome murders in
Pennsylvania coal country in the late 1870s reputedly carried out by
members of a secret society of Irish miners known as the Molly Maguires.
Dime novel writers were often journalists or newspaper editors, and the
conventions of journalism shaped how dime novels were narrated.4 Second,
popular stage melodramas were frequently written into dime novels or vice
versa. For example, ‘Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl; or Death at the
Wheel’ was a popular stage melodrama at the Bowery theatre in New York
before Street & Smith turned it into a dime novel in 1871. Third, dime
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novels and early cinema shared plots and narrative techniques. What
Happened to Mary?, a series of films about a New York working woman,
was simultaneously published as a story in instalments in the lowbrow
women’s magazine The Ladies’ World during its run in neighbourhood
nickelodeons, and adventure serial films of the 1910s such as The Hazards
of Helen appropriated dime-novel formulas.5
Moreover, these sensational stories circulated internationally. In the
absence of international copyright before 1891, melodramatic stories were
regularly translated or adapted to and from English, French, German and
Yiddish without crediting the original source or paying royalties. For
example, Eugene Sue’s bestselling Les Mystères de Paris became the proto-
type for ‘mysteries of the city’ novels in Germany, the United Kingdom and
the United States, as writers freely appropriated the plot and changed the
locale to repackage it for a new market. This resulted in a kind of world
literature that may have facilitated the education of new immigrants. For
example, the first English-language book Jewish immigrants to the United
States read was often a dime novel, whose plot they may have previously
encountered in Yiddish story papers.6
Dime novels participated from their beginnings in the 1840s in debates
over race and US imperial projects. Alongside the celebrated ‘mysteries of the
city’ stories were imperial adventure stories set in Mexico, Cuba, the Carib-
bean, or the American West. Critic Shelley Streeby calls the city and the
empire a ‘double feature of sorts in the sensational popular cultures of US
modernity’.7 Popular dime novelists like George Lippard and Ned Buntline
were champions of the artisan republic, but they also authored stories that
suggested Mexicans and Indians ought not to be part of it. For example,
representations in sensation fiction set during and after the US–Mexican War
(1846–8) effaced the differences between rich or middle-class men and
working-class men by emphasising their common whiteness and American-
ness, defined against Mexicans and Indians, the mixed-race others. Streeby
argues that two figures were especially critical in re-imagining the nation in
the light of US imperialism and immigration – the Irish soldier and the cross-
dressed Mexican woman. Would the Irish soldier prove himself a ‘real
American’ through his valour on the battlefield in Mexico, or would his
Catholicism make him turn traitor and make common cause with the enemy?
The cross-dressed Mexican heroines were an indictment of war or the lack of
civilisation in this ‘savage’ land, but they were sometimes returned to appro-
priate femininity and subordination through marriage to a US soldier. This
imagined heterosexual union between a US soldier and a Mexican woman
suggested that US occupation should be imagined as a voluntary alliance,
unlike the Spanish imperial violence inevitably figured as rape.
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Approximately one-third of Beadle & Adams dime novels written

between 1860 and 1865 were written by women, who imagined the nation
differently from male authors. Streeby argues that in place of the celebration
of imperial white manhood (i.e. all class and regional differences between
men are effaced), women writers like Ann Stephens, Metta Victor and Mary
Denison embraced a middle ground between the idle luxury of foreign or
slave-holding aristocrats and the irrational passions of the lower orders.
Working-girl novels were among the most popular genres, promising
immigrant working women the romance and adventure lacking in their
daily lives from the 1880s through the 1910s. Laura Jean Libbey was the
most famous writer of these texts, producing sixty novels in the 1880s and
1890s with aggregate sales of ten to fifteen million copies. The five hundred
or so dime-novel romances by ‘Bertha M. Clay’ were written by seven
different men and women writing under a single pseudonym.8 Although
they frequently ended with marriage to a millionaire, these stories featured
heroines who were not the meek, Christian women of the sentimental
fiction with which they were contemporary. Most often, the heroine was a
working girl who was orphaned and wrongly fired from her job in the
opening pages. She had to defend herself from dastardly higher-class villains
(hand-me-downs from the Gothic romances of the previous century) who
sought to ruin her reputation and prevent her marriage to the man she
loved. The spunky, independent heroine capably defended herself, outwit-
ting enemies who drugged her, kidnapped her, poisoned her, imprisoned her
and/or put her on board runaway trains. About a third of the way through
these novels, she was revealed to be a long-lost heiress to a family fortune.
Her fiancé (absent for most of the story) appeared only at the end to marry
her, once she had already defeated the villains and found her own way in the
world. Often he, too, had unexpectedly come into millions.
Working women took these dime novels to their mind-numbing jobs in
the clothing industries, where they talked about them with co-workers,
creating dream-worlds filled with adventure and romance. Lunch hours
were often so short that a working woman could not go out, but spending
a half-hour reading was a way to allow her mind to leave the shop, even if
her body could not. These stories insisted that one could be both a working
girl and a lady (an heiress to millions, no less!); that pluck and independence
were admirable feminine traits; and that a virtuous, hard-working girl could
find love, wealth and happiness in America. Although middle-class reform-
ers condemned working women for wasting their time and money on
escapist fiction rather than (for example) attending night school or union
activities, historian Nan Enstad insists that working women used these
consumer goods to create identities that resisted the dominant culture.
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Pulp sensations
Reading a dime novel in English was one way for an immigrant working
woman to claim an identity as a full-fledged American. Using her wages to
buy a book for herself rather than handing over her pay envelope unopened
to her family was a way of claiming the privileges of wage-earning custom-
arily exercised by men.9
In an attempt to better market their cheap fiction, dime-novel publishers
often organised titles into series featuring a common setting (the West), a
central character (Buffalo Bill, Deadwood Dick), or a theme (romance,
war). Dime-novel fiction was thoroughly commodified, and, as Michael
Denning notes, the various characters and series functioned like a brand
name for consumers who wanted to buy the same set of narrative pleasures
again and again. These genres overlapped and were in flux, however.
Modern genres – romances, Westerns, horror, science fiction, detective
stories – emerged in pulp magazines, dime novels’ descendants.
Pulp magazines
Although a few titles persisted into the early decades of the twentieth
century, dime novels were in decline by the 1890s. In 1891, the Inter-
national Copyright Agreement slowed international piracy; Sunday editions
of newspapers became more common; and changes in postal rates made it
unprofitable to distribute dime novels through the mail. Most important,
dime novels faced competition from a new cheap format – the pulp maga-
zine. In fact, many dime-novel publishers simply repackaged their sensa-
tional fiction as pulp magazines, and continued with series characters like
Buffalo Bill and Nick Carter. Street & Smith, the largest dime-novel
publisher, switched over completely to pulp-magazine format in 1915.10
Pulp magazines had lurid, technicolor covers designed to draw the eye of
a passing consumer at the news-stand. Inside, these 7 10 inch periodicals
held less visual appeal. They usually featured 128 pages of densely packed
print, interrupted only by a rare line drawing and a few pages of ads at the
front and back. Between 1896 and 1953, pulp magazines sold for between
five and twenty-five cents. Frank Munsey started the first pulp, Argosy, in
1896, but the pulp market really boomed between the World Wars, driven
by falling costs and rising literacy rates. Several hundred different titles
competed for the attention of their ten million regular readers in the
1920s, 1930s and early 1940s.
Like their dime-novel ancestors, pulp magazines were unambiguously
‘trash’ – banned from public libraries, scorned by respectable periodicals,
and widely held to feature stories that were commodities rather than works
of art. Pulp writers were piece-work prose producers, paid from one to five
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cents a word for fiction they cranked out at astonishing rates – 3,000–5,000
words a day, although some wrote twice as much. Priding himself on his
speed, long hours and productivity, Erle Stanley Gardner (who later became
famous as the creator of the lawyer-cum-investigator Perry Mason) called
himself a ‘fiction factory’, and told his editor at Argosy to ‘[l]et me know
what you want and I’ll try to manufacture something right to order’.11
Frederick Faust, the most prolific and highly paid pulp writer, was best
known for Westerns he penned under the name ‘Max Brand’, but he had
twenty pseudonyms and produced 196 novels, 226 novelettes, and 162
stories during his pulp career. He had nothing but disdain for this formid-
able output, however, claiming it was only hack work that supported his
real (and distinctly less profitable) calling as a poet.12
Pulp-magazine readers, scornfully referred to in the 1933 Vanity Fair
exposé discussed above as ‘those who move their lips when they read’, were
widely held to be socially and economically marginal. They were young,
often immigrants, working class, and lacking in formal education. They
were, a 1937 Harper’s article maintained, ‘stirred by the same things that
would interest and stir a savage’.13 Librarians and social workers lamented
that the proletariat read little else besides pulp magazines, and identified the
improvement of their reading tastes as a major policy initiative.
Pulp magazines and mass-market magazines or ‘slicks’ like Saturday
Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan defined themselves
in opposition to each other. ‘Slicks’ were named for the expensive, shiny
paper on which they were printed, paper necessary for quality reproduction
of images. These magazines had circulations in the millions, were expensive
to produce, and depended on advertising to underwrite their substantial
costs of production. Because they depended on national brand advertising
to pay the bills, most of these magazines targeted white, middle-class
women as ‘purchasing agents’ for their families. The pulps had smaller
circulations, low production costs, and little advertising (mostly for corres-
pondence schools and patent medicines). Many pulp writers and editors
prided themselves on their artisanal independence from the world of con-
sumer culture. Pulp fiction sold itself, they maintained, requiring neither the
fancy pictures nor the slick, shiny packaging of stories in mass-market
magazines.
At first, most pulps – like Argosy – were general fiction magazines, but
specialisation for niche markets began soon after. By 1930, the inclusive,
something-for-everyone All-Story had been replaced by its topical spin-offs:
Love Story, Detective Story and Western Story. Between the World Wars
there were about 200 specialised titles dedicated to romance, detective
fiction, Westerns, aviation, war, football and science fiction, among others.
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Pulp sensations
Although there is considerable evidence of cross-over reading, genres were

niche-marketed by gender. The endless variety of action/adventure pulps
and the sexually explicit ‘spicy’ pulps were intended for men; the romances,
for women. Although there were fewer romance titles, they had the largest
circulations. For example, Street & Smith’s Love Story achieved the largest
circulation of any pulp magazine when it peaked at 600,000 in the 1930s.14
Rather than imagining each tale as unique, pulp publishers marketed
stories like any other commodity, targeting each ‘brand’ of story to a pre-
constituted audience. In addition, stories that initially appeared as serials in
the pulps were sometimes subsequently issued in book form.
The genres that emerged from these increasingly specialised pulp maga-
zines – romance, Westerns, science fiction, horror, hard-boiled detective
stories – developed characteristic plots and styles. Romances – usually
narrated in a melodramatic style critics denigrated as ‘purple prose’ –
always ended with the heroine getting her man. Science fiction authors were
obsessively interested in the details of technology and prided themselves on
the ‘good science’ in their tales. Hard-boiled detective stories featured short,
action-packed chapters and were narrated in a terse, tough vernacular. In an
article for the upscale Atlantic Monthly in 1944, Raymond Chandler placed
his fellow private eye novelist Dashiell Hammett in the distinguished liter-
ary company of Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway,
praising his muscular no-nonsense prose as an authentic representation of
‘the American language’, a sign that pulp fiction was starting to acquire a
new respectability.15
Hard-boiled detective stories first began to appear in the pages of the pulp
magazine Black Mask in the early 1920s, although they could subsequently
be found in Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective, Clues and Detective
Story, among others. Dashiell Hammett’s best-known novels – Red Harvest
(1929), The Glass Key (1931), The Maltese Falcon (1929, 1930) – were
initially serials in Black Mask. Raymond Chandler ‘cannibalised’ his pulp-
magazine stories – lifting characters, plots and entire sections of description
and dialogue – to write the novels that made his name such as Farewell, My
Lovely (1940). Hard-boiled writers like Hammett and Chandler saw their
fiction as a manly, American, ‘realistic’ reaction against the silly, aristocratic
English-country-house fiction written by women like Dorothy Sayers and
Agatha Christie who dominated the literary marketplace between the World
Wars. Moreover, Black Mask was (in its own words) a ‘breeding station for
the movies’. Hard-boiled stories were frequently made into Hollywood
films within a year or two after publication, and hard-boiled writers
(including Chandler) headed west in droves to work as screenwriters on
those films.16
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Hard-boiled fiction is notorious for its complex, convoluted plots.

Whereas stories by Sherlock Holmes were centrally about the rational
process of uncovering the truth and restoring social order, hard-boiled
tales were a hodge-podge of fist fights, hard drinking and tough talk that
seldom resolved themselves neatly and frequently raised significant doubt
about the justice of the status quo. Although the fast-moving, complicated
plots of these stories may have habituated readers to the logic of work
under scientific management – to working without a clear, managerial
overview of the entire process – hard-boiled heroes were nonetheless
champions of the manly autonomy of skilled artisans. For example, when
Elihu Willsson of Hammett’s Red Harvest hires the Continental Op to
clean up the corruption plaguing his city, the Op insists on the autonomy
to run his investigation his way: ‘I’d have to have a free hand – no favors
to anybody – run the job as I pleased . . . That’s the way it’ll have to be.
Take it or leave it.’17 Similarly, the Op resists corporate oversight of his
investigations from his boss, the director of the Continental Detective
Agency, back in San Francisco: ‘It’s right enough for the Agency to have
rules and regulations, but when you’re out on a job you’ve got to do it the
best way you can.’18 Hard-boiled heroes’ battles with clients and cops over
the right to run their investigations their way had a great deal of symbolic
resonance for workers engaged in a losing battle over Taylorism and
scientific management in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the ways working
men appropriated these stories, then, was as allegories about workers’
control and autonomy. Although he seldom made much money, the hard-
boiled hero kept the faith, demanding the right to skilled, autonomous
work in a world where craft labour was becoming increasingly de-skilled
(and un-manned).
Hard-boiled detective stories recreated not only the disappearing artisa-
nal republic, but also the patriarchal privileges that once came with it.
Hard-boiled narratives are forever returning uppity women to their trad-
itional place or sending the unrepentant ones to their deaths or prison. The
mercenary, hard-drinking, fist-fighting, fast-car-driving Dinah Brand in
Hammett’s Red Harvest – who assists the Continental Op with his investi-
gation from the outset – is brutally murdered, an act of narrative retribution
for her transgressive, manly behaviour. Effie Perine, Sam Spade’s secretary
in The Maltese Falcon, is truly an ‘office wife’, tending to his wounds,
putting up with his abuse, and staying awake all night worriedly awaiting
his return. Hard-boiled detective stories – which prominently featured
spunky, loyal secretaries in love with their bosses and young damsels in
need of his rescue – reassured readers that women – paycheques aside – were
nonetheless still domestic and subordinate.
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Pulp sensations
Hard-boiled heroes also talked back, demonstrating their rhetorical

prowess alongside their physical strength and patriarchal power. In a scene
from Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, detective Sam Spade refuses to divulge
his suspicions to the ‘legitimate’ authorities in the form of a district attorney.
‘My guess might be excellent, or it might be crummy,’ he says, ‘but
Mrs. Spade didn’t raise any children dippy enough to make guesses in front
of a district attorney, an assistant district attorney, and a stenographer.’19
Spade is a working-man’s wish-fulfilment. He is in control, dominating
these dim-witted bureaucrats with his smart-ass rhetoric and his superior
knowledge, preserving his independence to do the job his way and his right
to speak his mind.
Hard-boiled detective stories – tough and proletarian though they were –
were also bizarrely preoccupied with the details of clothing and décor. For
example, here is Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe at the start of The
Big Sleep (1939): ‘I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt,
tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark
blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care
who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.
I was calling on four million dollars.’20 Again and again, hard-boiled
detective stories attended to clothing and other consumer goods as object
lessons in how power, social class and status were displayed for others to
read. Again and again, the solutions to mysteries depended on having a
good eye for details – silk slips left behind, too much make-up on a woman’s
dressing table, a hat that clashes with newly dyed hair. If hard-boiled
detectives were bad consumers (in almost twenty years of sleuthing,
Chandler’s Philip Marlowe never goes shopping), they nonetheless demysti-
fied for readers the importance of reading and displaying the increasingly
prominent consumer goods of the era for achieving social and professional
advancement.
Although many hard-boiled detective stories participated enthusiastically
in the racisms of their time – reassuring white readers of their superiority –
they often undermined the stable identities on which racisms were based.
For example, Erle Stanley Gardner’s Black Mask detective Ed Jenkins – a
master of disguise – was equally successful passing himself off as an English
country gentleman and a Chinese herb doctor. The Chinese gangsters in
Hammett’s ‘Dead Yellow Women’ (Black Mask, 1925) deployed their
ethnic/racial ties strategically, invoking blood ties only when it served their
self-interest and promised a profit. Even hard-boiled heroes with Anglo-
Saxon names like Philip Marlowe were at risk of losing their historic white
privilege. When Marlowe goes to call on a client in High Window (1942), a
housekeeper takes his card and slams the door in his face. Marlowe cools his
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heels in the garden, pacing around a statue of a little black boy in livery on
the client’s front lawn. ‘I thought that maybe I ought to have gone to the
back door,’ he muses to himself. He pats the ‘little Negro’ on the head and says,
‘Brother, you and me both.’21 Marlowe is ‘black’ in this scenario, because he is
working for a wealthy white woman, not because of skin colour. That race is
portrayed as a social fiction is a measure of the slippery distinction between
privileged, skilled white workers losing status under Taylorism and the largely
unskilled racial/ethnic others against whom they defined themselves.22 This
rethinking of racial/ethnic identity as a matter of performance or masquerade
made it possible for writers of colour like Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress,
1990) and Michael Nava (The Little Death, 1986) to remake the genre for
anti-racist purposes in the 1980s, 1990s and beyond.
If one considers a variety of unconventional sources – pulp-magazine
advertising, the memoirs of writers and publishers, Depression-era studies
of adult reading habits, and labour history – it is possible to reconstruct how
working-class readers of detective pulp magazines appropriated this fiction
in complex and sometimes politically contradictory ways. Readers found
both nostalgia for a disappearing artisanal culture of working men and
lengthy descriptions of dress and décor that instructed them in navigating
the new consumer economy that was rapidly displacing it. Hard-boiled
heroes demonstrated their rhetorical prowess in a terse, proletarian ver-
nacular, but these stories were also self-consciously about the links between
educated language, social class and culture. For working men, hard-boiled
detective stories were about embattled, white artisan-heroes who resisted
encroaching commodity culture and the consuming women who came with
it. At the same time, this fiction shaped readers into consumers through
object lessons about how power, class and culture were maintained by a
man’s skill in buying and displaying consumer goods.
American hard-boiled detective stories crossed the Atlantic and found
fans and imitators in France and the United Kingdom. For example,
Maurice Duhamel started La Série Noire in 1945 as an imprint of French
publishing house Gallimard to publish translations of hard-boiled writing
by the likes of Chester Himes and David Goodis, as well as their French
imitators. Post-Second-World-War labour leaders in Britain interviewed as
part of an oral history project by Ken Worpole spoke at length about the
tough, hard-boiled writing they had read in their youth. Although most of
these books were American, by the 1930s, British writers like James Hadley
Chase (No Orchids for Miss Blandish, 1934) and Peter Cheyney (This Man
is Dangerous, 1936) had embraced the hard-boiled style. These stories
represented working-class speech and everyday practices, the corruption
of big business and the less-than-savoury elements of life in large cities.
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Pulp sensations
However, hard-boiled fiction is an ambivalent proletarian literature, at best.

Historically, private detectives like the Pinkertons were opponents of organ-
ised labour, and hard-boiled detectives – with their commitment to rugged
individualism – were hardly poster boys for class solidarity. Nonetheless,
working-class militants read these stories as having ‘mechanic accents’, and
were inspired by their reading to think critically about industrial capitalism
and social class.23
Science fiction as a self-conscious genre also arose from pulp magazines in
the 1920s. In 1926, Luxembourg emigrant Hugo Gernsback, an inventor
and electronics expert, founded Amazing Stories after noting the popularity
of stories he ran as filler in his technology journal, Modern Electronics. The
success of Amazing Stories spawned imitators such as Wonder Stories (also
edited by Gernsback) and Astounding Stories (edited in its heyday by Jack
Campbell). Until after the Second World War, science fiction existed almost
exclusively in the pulps, introducing audiences to now well-known writers
such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Theodore
Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and others.
The utopian element of science fiction often drew writers with socialist
sympathies. For example, George Henry Rice wrote poetry for the US
Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker under his real name and
fiction for Amazing Stories and Weird Tales under a pseudonym. In the
1930s, the Futurian Society of New York, a voluntary organisation of
science fiction writers who were members of the Communist Party or who
espoused its politics, wrote and published science fiction with the explicit
aim of helping to bring about the socialist future through their work. The
Society included such major figures as Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl.24
From the beginning, there was a close relationship between readers and
writers of science fiction. Amazing Stories always printed the full names and
addresses of readers who wrote letters to the editor, facilitating fan net-
working and organising. Often young fans edited the most important
pulp titles. Initially, readers were almost exclusively young, white men.
Self-professed nerds, many had a good technological education, and early
promoters of the genre prided themselves on its scientific accuracy.25 Like
hard-boiled detective stories, science fiction could function as a compen-
satory literature for those lacking autonomy and control in their jobs. In
stories where the courage and ingenuity of a single individual saved civilisa-
tion, readers were given the vicarious experience of individual agency
increasingly absent from the workplace.
Although women and minority writers in the 1960s and 1970s such as
Octavia Butler, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula LeGuin and Samuel Delany
transformed the genre by imagining worlds without or beyond gender and
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erin a. smith
race, early science fiction was marked by the privileged, masculinist bias of
its readers and writers. Too often, it looked at the world, outer space, other
planets and sometimes women and people of other races or species as so
much territory to be colonised and subdued with the superior technology
controlled by white, male heroes.
The close relay between readers and writers of science fiction pulps was
formalised in the pulps’ close relative – the confession magazine. Published
on paper one grade better than pulp and featuring many of the same
advertisements for mail-order courses, patent medicines and body-building
programmes, Bernarr Macfadden’s True Story was the first of the modern
confession magazines. Founded in 1919, after Macfadden was inspired by
readers’ letters sent to his Physical Culture magazine, it had over two
million readers by the mid-1920s, mostly working class and predominantly
women.26
What Macfadden did was to abolish the distinction between readers and
writers, printing ‘true’ first-person narratives of his readers’ (often sexual)
exploits for the pleasure of other readers. Macfadden sold these stories as by,
for and about ‘the people’, and he sold his audience to advertisers as the
‘authentic’ working class. The main characters in these stories were seldom
enmeshed in the tight-knit networks of kin and ethnic community charac-
teristic of the largely immigrant working class, however. Reading these stories
invited readers to imagine themselves as individuals who defined themselves
not through class and kin, but through the products they bought.27 As in the
case of hard-boiled detective stories, Macfadden’s True Stories welcomed
working-class audiences into the world of mass consumption.
Paperbacks
The pulp-magazine market folded in the early 1950s from competition with
comic books, television and their descendants – mass-market paperbacks.
Spurred by new technological innovations – the much faster magazine
rotary press and quick-drying, synthetic glue – the popular American paper-
back first appeared on the scene in 1939 when Pocket Books launched a
series of twenty-five-cent books to be sold and distributed like magazines
at news-stands, drugstores, train stations and bus depots instead of
trade bookshops.28 Many paperback-publishing houses such as Ace,
Dell, Avon and Popular Library were started by men who had learned
how to sell cheap fiction in the pulp-magazine business, and paperbacks
shared the pulps’ low literary reputation.29 One historian characterises
the inaccurate and reductive critical consensus on these paperback origin-
als from the 1940s and 1950s as: ‘little more than second-rate trash.
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Pulp sensations
Literary flotsam. Schlock turned out to appease a gluttonous mass

appetite for sex and sensationalism.’30
Although paperback publishing houses like Fawcett, Pocket Books,
Bantam, Ace, Signet and Dell sometimes reprinted classics or contemporary
bestsellers, disreputable paperback originals were their bread and butter.
These stories were regarded as scandalous, because they often explored
transgressive subcultures (criminals, juvenile delinquents, lesbians), and
their characters were not always punished for their deviance. As in the case
of their pulp predecessors, libraries would not carry them and newspapers
did not review them. Although serious mainstream publishers struggled to
get books like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover past the censors, pulp
publishers often got controversial or marginal texts into print, since twenty-
five-cent books sold at gas stations and bus terminals were beneath the
notice of cultural authorities.31
Like the dime-novel and pulp-magazine fiction that preceded them, these
stories were commodities, and the author’s name was often subordinated to
the publishers’ brand. For example, a Dell romance had a red heart on the
cover, selling the product line rather than the unique voice of the author.
Although seldom paid by the word like the authors of dime novels and pulp-
magazine stories, paperback writers often received one-time payments for a
manuscript instead of royalties, and creativity was less important than
rapid, consistent production. Stories were packaged by genre (mystery,
crime/noir, romance, Westerns, etc.) and promised customers a predictable
product. Paperbacks were also convenient – small, portable, disposable –
and readers could carry one in a pocket or handbag to read in brief snatches
over lunch, during a break, or while commuting.
A 1941 survey of 40,000 readers by Pocket Books confirmed that buyers
of paperbacks sounded remarkably like the buyers of pulp magazines:
‘locomotive engineers, musicians, mechanics, salesmen, clerks, waitresses,
writers, editors, schoolteachers, ranchers, and farmers’. Moreover, these
readers were buying two to twenty times more books than they otherwise
would have, because paperbacks were inexpensive (a quarter vs. two dollars
or more) and easily accessible outside trade bookshops.32 For example, in
1941 in Columbus, Ohio, there were six trade bookstores, but 224 locations
at which one could buy a Pocket book.33
Paperback originals were like pulp magazines, then, in that they were both
cheap, readily available, produced by low-budget publishing houses, and
scorned by cultural authorities as formulaic, sensational and probably corrupt-
ing. The world of the paperback original was different from the world of pulp
magazines, however. If Hammett, Chandler et al. could imagine pulp maga-
zines as a kind of democratic literary underworld – a truly mass medium – the
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erin a. smith
‘mechanic accents’ of paperback originals were considerably less clear. For

example, the heirs of hard-boiled detective stories in the 1950s and 1960s were
noir paperback originals (crime novels with a dark, fatalistic worldview) by the
likes of David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, W. R. Burnett and
Charles Willeford. These protagonists were not proletarian heroes, but self-
destructive criminals and sociopaths, and the psychological corruption of their
criminal minds increasingly replaced the social corruption of the cities that
preoccupied hard-boiled heroes of the 1930s.34 In the 1940s and 1950s, paper-
back publishing expanded into various submarkets targeting diverse reading
publics that could not be arranged hierarchically. The audience for paperbacks
was larger than that for pulp magazines, and its socioeconomic, geographic and
educational ‘reach’ was broader. Trashy paperback originals mingled promis-
cuously with cheap reprints of literary classics by New American Library and
others. One could not tell from the cover alone whether cultural uplift or
sensationalised corruption lay within and this uncertainty tended to blur any
clear distinction between high and low.35
Although hard-boiled heroes had seen better days, the years between
1950 and 1965 were the ‘golden age’ of a new genre, lesbian pulps. Roughly
five hundred mass-market paperbacks with lurid covers featuring half-
dressed women and promising accounts of ‘forbidden love’ flooded news-
stands and drugstore displays. They featured mostly sensationalised stories
about the sexual taboos broken in a variety of all-female environments –
schools, prisons, the military – or in bohemian venues like Greenwich
Village. The first such novel was a paperback original put out by Fawcett-
Gold Medal, Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks (1950), an account of the
love affairs of a group of young women in the Free French Forces living in a
London barracks during the Second World War. Women’s Barracks was
translated from the French by Torres’s husband and had a moralising
narrator added specifically for American audiences. Condemned by the
House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, it was none-
theless an underground bestseller (4 million copies in the US and many more
abroad). Gold Medal followed up with Vin Packer’s Spring Fire (1952)
about the sexual adventures of women in a college sorority. Ann Bannon
wrote a fan letter to Vin Packer, who facilitated the publication of Bannon’s
own celebrated Beebo Brinker series with Gold Medal.36 Unlike many
lesbian pulps, which focused on the coming-of-age/sexual awakening of a
single heroine, the Beebo Brinker novels portray the lives and loves of an
entire gay and lesbian community in Greenwich Village as the characters
develop and mature over a number of years. A 2008 off-Broadway produc-
tion based on the novels, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, introduced a whole
new generation to Bannon’s work. Ann Aldrich’s ethnographies of lesbian
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Pulp sensations
life, We Walk Alone (1955) and We, Too, Must Love (1958), inspired
hundreds of readers to write to the author seeking advice and practical
information about lesbian life in New York.37
Censors and moral watchdogs of the day assumed these pulps were read
by straight men seeking titillation. At least initially, writers and editors did
too. They were astonished when hundreds of letters from lesbian readers
flooded in, but wasted no time in producing new titles for this unexpected
new audience.38 Literary critic Yvonne Keller distinguishes between what
she calls ‘virile adventure’ pulps mostly written and read by heterosexual
men seeking voyeuristic pleasures and ‘pro-lesbian’ pulps more favourable
to women readers, although she concedes that their packaging was indistin-
guishable. Most stories ended badly for the lesbian in question. Either the
seduction/proposal of the right kind of man ended the heroine’s lesbian
adventuring, or the unrepentant lesbians suffered some sort of narrative
retribution – violent death, hopeless alcoholism, empty lives of twisted
desperation.39 Roughly 10 per cent of these books offered more positive
rewritings of the genre from a woman’s point of view.40 In Valerie Taylor’s
The Girls in 3-B (1959), for example, the lesbian character (Barby) gets her
happily-ever-after. ‘It’s what I’ve wanted, all my life,’ she breathes after her
first lesbian encounter. ‘How can anybody want a man, when there’s this?’41
Traditionally, histories of lesbian literature jump from Radclyffe Hall’s The
Well of Loneliness (1928) to the lesbian feminist publishing boom of the
1970s, portraying the era in between as a vast, literary wasteland. Scholars
in the late 1980s and early 1990s reassessed this literature’s significance when
lesbian autobiographers began to testify that these books were immensely
important to their coming of age in the 1950s. Lesbian pulps might have been
formulaic, exploitative, sensational and often homophobic, but they were
what Joan Nestle calls ‘survival literature’. In a world that offered lesbians
few stories about themselves (and certainly no positive ones), these pulp
paperbacks offered cheap, available representations of lesbian lives, which
were especially important to those women isolated by geography, religion, or
family. They offered knowledge and possibilities for identification to a reader
in the privacy of her own home.42 These pulp novels helped to create an
imagined community of readers who shared a sense of collective sexual iden-
tity (as opposed to a personal sense of sin) that could be activated for political
purposes, as it arguably was in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall uprising.43
Conclusion
Pulp fiction is alive and well. The celebrated pulp revival in the 1980s and
1990s was centred specifically on noir paperbacks, and, at least initially,
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erin a. smith
was spearheaded by small, independent publishers. Between 1984 and

1990, writer/editor Barry Gifford published over ninety books under the
Black Lizard imprint of the Creative Arts Book Company, mostly noir
classics from the 1950s and 1960s by writers like Charles Willeford, David
Goodis and Jim Thompson with stylised versions of their original pulp
covers. Also in the early 1980s, British writer/publisher Maxim Jakubowski
republished Goodis, Thompson, Horace McCoy, Cornell Woolrich,
W. R. Burnett and others for a short-lived imprint of Zomba Books called
Black Box Thrillers. In 1990, Random House bought out Black Lizard,
merged it with their Vintage Crime imprint, and let many of the edgiest titles
go out of print. Nevertheless, this revival introduced a whole new gener-
ation of young readers to this self-conscious noir sensibility and its brash,
aggressively masculine, lowbrow aesthetic. Contemporary writers and film-
makers lovingly re-create this aesthetic in their fiction and film. James
Ellroy (Brown’s Requiem, 1981; Black Dahlia, 1987) faithfully re-creates
the world and style of 1940s pulp magazines with his dense plotting,
fatalistic worldview and terse prose. Quentin Tarantino famously paid
homage to this visual aesthetic in his 1994 film, Pulp Fiction.
However, as this essay has made clear, pulp fiction was (and is) a much
bigger and more ambiguously gendered phenomenon. Women wrote and
read pulp fiction in all its varieties – romance, crime stories, science fiction,
tales of lesbian love.44 Pulp includes not only the urban tough guys, but also
Louis L’Amour Westerns, cranked out at the rate of three a year in the 1980s
for Bantam, a mass-market paperback house. These formulaic novels still
bear a remarkable resemblance to their nineteenth-century prototype, James
Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. Pulp also includes contemporary
romance novels, whose readers – like the readers of Laura Jean Libbey dime
novels in the 1880s – prefer their heroines ‘spunky’ and ‘independent’.45
Harlequin Enterprises, a Canadian publisher of mass-market romances,
conducted unprecedented market research with women readers in the early
1970s in order to tailor their regular, monthly releases exactly to readers’
specifications, and their substantial success inspired copy-cat lines from a
number of other publishers. Clearly, pulp fiction has targeted both men and
women, albeit often through different texts. It has been preoccupied with
city and empire, labour and love, the American frontier and the ‘last
frontier’, artisan republicanism and working-girl romance, dicks and dykes.
‘Pulp’ names a unique kind of literary production – blatantly commercial,
often formulaic and sensational – that was easily available and affordably
priced for those outside the traditional book-buying public. Pulp fiction was
centrally concerned with social class and its intersections with gender and
sexuality, race or ethnicity and nation. These texts are sources for studying
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Pulp sensations
popular ideologies, for investigating the encounter between commercial

culture and the needs and desires of ordinary people. These sensational
texts help us answer such questions as: how does popular fiction shape us
into the kinds of men and women, workers and managers our society
requires? How does popular fiction offer escape from or transgression of
oppressive social codes? What kind of fantasies do ordinary people find
compelling, and what kinds of collective fantasies are they sold? Lacking
control over the means of cultural production, what kinds of reading
practices must they engage in to ‘make do’ with these texts, to adapt them
to their authentic needs and desires? These questions are as compelling in
the early twenty-first century as they were in the 1840s, in spite of
immensely different contexts for the production, marketing and consump-
tion of cheap, popular fiction.
NOTES
1 Marcus Duffield, ‘The Pulps: Day Dreams for the Masses’, Vanity Fair, June
1933, p. 26.
2 Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture
in America (New York: Verso, 1987, rev. edn 1998), pp. 23, 21, 18.
3 Ibid., pp. 73–4.
4 Ibid., pp. 18, 24.
5 Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular
Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 38, 164.
6 Ibid., pp. 36, 56; Denning, Mechanic Accents, p. 37.
7 Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of
Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 35.
8 Enstad, Ladies of Labor, pp. 42, 40.
9 See ibid., ch. 2.
10 On the history of pulp magazines, see Erin A. Smith, Hard-Boiled: Working-
Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2000), p. 19.
11 Erle Stanley Gardner, letter to Joseph Thompson Shaw, 23 August 1926, Erle
Stanley Gardner Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University
of Texas, Austin (hereafter HRC). Erle Stanley Gardner, letter to A. H. Bittner,
21 June 1928, Erle Stanley Gardner Papers, HRC.
12 Quoted in Christine Bold, Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860–
1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 76, 91–2.
13 Margaret MacMullen, ‘Pulps and Confessions’, Harper’s Monthly Magazine,
June 1937, p. 98.
14 Smith, Hard-Boiled, p. 27.
15 Raymond Chandler, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, Atlantic Monthly (1944).
Reprinted in Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (New York:
Vintage, 1988).
16 Black Mask xix, 9 (Nov. 1936); 15.
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erin a. smith
17 Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 42, 44.
18 Ibid., p. 117.
19 Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 145.
20 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 3.
21 Raymond Chandler, The High Window (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 4–5.
22 Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and
Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 69–72.
23 Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives (London: Verso, 1983), ch. 2.
24 David M. Earle, Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice
of Form (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), p. 114.
25 Adam Roberts, Science Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2000), ch. 2.
26 Ann Fabian, ‘Making a Commodity of Truth: Speculations on the Career of
Bernarr Macfadden’, American Literary History 5 (Spring 1993): 56, 59–60.
27 Ibid., pp. 65–6, 70.
28 There were a number of smaller-scale paperback enterprises in the USA that pre-
dated Pocket Books. The first to mass-produce paperback books and use maga-
zine distribution systems was American Mercury Books in 1937. See Janice
Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984, 1991), pp. 25–7.
29 The founders included A. A. Wyn (Ace), George Delacorte (Dell), Joseph Myers
(Avon) and Ned Pines (Popular Library). See Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture:
The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton, 1984), ch. 5.
30 Ibid., p. xi.
31 On the cultural and social context in which pulp paperbacks circulated, see Livia
Tenzer and Jean Casella, ‘Publisher’s Foreword: Women Write Pulp’, in Faith
Baldwin, Skyscraper (New York: Feminist Press, 2003), pp. v–xiv. It appears
(with slightly different pagination) in all of the series’ books.
32 John Tebbel, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing
in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 296.
33 Quoted in Yvonne Keller, ‘“Was It Right to Love Her Brother’s Wife So
Passionately?”: Lesbian Pulp Novels and US Lesbian Identity, 1950–1965’,
American Quarterly 57:2 (June 2005): 403.
34 McCann, Gumshoe America, p. 199.
35 Ibid., pp. 211–12.
36 Keller, ‘“Was It Right . . .”’, pp. 388–93.
37 Stephanie Foote, ‘Afterword: Ann Aldrich and Lesbian Writing in the Fifties’, in
We Walk Alone, by Ann Aldrich (New York: Feminist Press, 2006), pp. 157–83.
38 Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before
Stonewall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 143, 195.
39 Keller, ‘“Was It Right . . .”’, p. 388; Lisa Walker, ‘Afterword’, The Girls in 3-B,
by Valerie Taylor (New York: Feminist Press, 2003), pp. 179–206.
40 Keller, ‘“Was It Right . . .”’, p. 390.
41 Valerie Taylor, The Girls in 3-B (New York: Feminist Press, 2003), p. 137.
42 Keller, ‘“Was It Right . . .”’, pp. 385–6.
43 Ibid., pp. 405–7.
44 Tenzer and Casella, ‘Publisher’s Foreword’, Skyscraper, p. v.
45 Radway, Reading the Romance, pp. 123–37.
158
9
FRED BOTTING
Bestselling fiction: machinery,

economy, excess
‘Brand new bestseller’

A train arrives at the station of a provincial English town. A dozing passenger
glances out of the window of a second-class carriage. His eye is caught by a
poster advertising a work of fiction: most of the sheet is taken up by an image
of the book’s cover, a shadowy figure (possibly a woman) looking provocative
or threatening from beneath the wide brim of a dark hat over which the title
(Killing Time or Fatal Passion?) is boldly splashed. A writer’s name is high-
lighted at the bottom (possibly that of a man). It, too, barely registers. The
passenger’s gaze is held by an untidy strip cutting diagonally across the poster,
as if it were pasted on separately and in haste, the urgency of the style
designed precisely to urge passers-by to pay attention to the information on
display: ‘the brand new bestseller out on . . .’. Like the title and the writer’s
name, the date is forgotten, only the fact that it is a short while in the future is
noted: this bestseller is yet to be published.
‘Brand new bestseller’: everything about bestselling fiction can be found
in the phrase, in the setting, and in the (forgotten) details of its advertise-
ment. The latter makes its appeal to readers on the basis of a familiar and
instantly recognisable genre: the half-remembered cover and clichéd titles,
connoting ‘sex’, ‘mystery’ and ‘danger’, suggest thriller/detective fiction
(‘killing’ and ‘fatal’) or romance (‘passion’). From genre a series of associ-
ations unravel: that the work about to be on sale follows a formulaic and
mechanical set of conventions immediately evident to any number of people
on the move, themselves, perhaps, reading to pass (even ‘kill’) time on a dull
journey on a mechanical form of public transportation. Railways and
reading have a long and popular association in which quantity is often set
above quality.1 The passenger, indeed, sits in a second-class carriage. The
garish cover reproduced on the poster demands immediate attention, just as
newness promises a degree of novelty. Like its generic markers, there is no
appeal to subtlety or surprise. Surface is all: in the realm of popular fiction,
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fred botting
it is obligatory to judge books by their covers. Advertised, demanding

attention, the poster – one of several on boards along the platform – situates
its subject in a world of commodities: bestselling, if nothing else, is con-
cerned with shifting large numbers of units.
What is not noticed or forgotten in the scene is also significant. The
failure to remember a title or name indicates that neither are worthy of
note; that a tacit and habituated ‘literary’ response to popular and generic
forms of fiction is operative: the writer’s name is not associated with vision,
innovative style or creativity, but serves as the guarantee of a certain type of
product, a brand marking a homogeneity between related commodities. The
dismissive and inattentive response to most of the apparently key aspects of
the poster also suggests a high cultural view that distinguishes literature
from a realm of fiction that is thoroughly embroiled in commercial consider-
ations. But distinctions between quality and quantity are not so definitive,
as the object of the passenger’s interest suggests: the phrase ‘brand new
bestseller’ implies there is more at stake than a separation between a world
of goods, genres, advertising gimmicks and sales figures, a world in which
quantity counts, and a domain in which higher aesthetic qualities, values,
sensibilities and judgements prevail outside or beyond merely material or
commercial interests. Perhaps that is why the phrase attracts the attention
of the passenger: it does not make sense to advertise a ‘bestseller’ before
publication, that is, before any copies of the work have been sold. Hence,
the designation, from one perspective, confirms the view that advertising
takes liberties with common sense and proper language in order to make
preposterous popular appeals. It also indicates that ‘bestseller’ is not merely
descriptive of retrospectively quantifiable success in a book market, but
a particular sub-category of popular fiction that has a set of distinctive
characteristics as well as, and before, any appearance on bestseller lists.
Spotting the characteristics does not necessarily guarantee superlative sales
figures: finding a winning formula for bestselling fiction is notoriously
difficult, except with hindsight, and the book trade is not that different
from any other business in which identifying, marketing and selling a
successful product remains subject to a host of unpredictable factors.
Further, the appellation of ‘bestseller’ in advance of any sales is part of a
marketing strategy (like announcing high advances or huge deals on paper-
back or film rights) designed to foster the buyer-reader’s confidence that the
product will meet generic expectations. To name a ‘bestseller’ serves to
create its own market, announcing what it wants to become so that poten-
tial buyers will be swayed into making it so. In a world in which the
caprices of consumer desire are both dominant and uncertain, the promo-
tion of imagined success can have real economic effects. In a world in
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Bestselling fiction: machinery, economy, excess
which fiction and fantasy overlap with the ‘symbolic’ and ‘intangible’
market of wishes, images, expectations, questions of lifestyle, surface and
commodities become paramount.
‘Immaculate commerce’
Aesthetic and economic evaluations predominate in accounts of bestselling
fiction. On closer inspection of the categories invoked in discussions of the
‘bestseller’, matters are less clear-cut than they initially – and often critically –
appear to be. There are, nonetheless, two main and overlapping areas from
which discussions take their bearings: bestsellers require a set of critical and
cultural values to give them meaning (since quantity, despite the term’s
appeal to an extraordinary number of sales, is not the only criterion) and
a social and economic context in which to circulate. The latter is directly
related to matters of quantity: to outsell other fictions, it is necessary to have
a large market and in order to have that kind of audience books must be
distributed, advertised and sold in a system that is both commercial and
economic (publishers, printers, libraries and bookshops, readers with time
and money to read). The notion of bestselling thus immediately implies a
world of commodities, production and consumption, a world, ostensibly
at least, operating in terms of quantifiable and measurable factors of
costs and profits, financial outlays and returns, and one which in turn
provides ammunition for aesthetic and critical judgements predicated on
the elevation of art above commercial interests. It would thus seem logical
that specific material contexts – a mass readership in particular – precede
and inform aesthetic ideas and values. Historically, however, the critical and
aesthetic conditions, though invoking the spectre of a mass, undiscrimin-
ating and lower-class readership, emerge first, setting the terms in which
popular fiction comes to be assessed.
Mechanism and monstrosity are repeatedly associated with mass culture’s
standardisations and vulgarity. Almost before it is established, high culture
defines itself through the threat of various imagined popular and mass
cultures, a ‘flood’, a ‘monster’ always on the point of overwhelming more
sophisticated and humane values and practices. As Stuart Hall and Paddy
Whannel outline, the critique is almost as formulaic as the cultural forms
that are criticised, assuming power’s association with an elite, a hackneyed
mass production of sameness, distortions of a sense of reality and the
corruption of sensibilities, the destruction of the past and the promotion
of mediocrity, personality and escapism.2 Though the critical terms of high
culture are regularly, almost uniformly, repeated, the objects of its criticism
change over time, as do the contexts of enunciation. There appears,
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fred botting
especially given the extent to which aesthetic categories seem to precede and
frame cultural evaluations and practices, interdependency in the relations
between high and popular culture, a more dynamic exchange in the defining
of boundaries. Novels need romances to guarantee their superiority; literary
geniuses need hack writers to distinguish their higher Romantic sensibilities;
the literary clerisy needs the threat of mass cultural deluge and degeneration
to reinvigorate its sense of its moral purpose.
Reading masses
Many of the features that are more readily associated with mass, consumer
culture (celebrity, promotion, marketing, commodities) were already evi-
dent in the nineteenth century. It is not, however, just the number of sales
that constitutes a bestseller. Robert Escarpit’s sociological approach to the
bestseller combines volume and speed to determine the category, plotted on
sales graphs, to distinguish ‘fastsellers’, ‘steadysellers’ and ‘bestsellers’: the
latter is distinguished for its strong initial sales – like the fastseller – and for
its capacity to sell well over a period of time – like the steadyseller.3 While
accounting for the success of specific volumes, this approach does not
address the genres that constitute bestsellers (the ‘blockbuster’, say) or a
bestselling author: Barbara Cartland’s individual works rarely appear atop
bestseller lists.
As writing became professionalised and authors more entrepreneurial in
the nineteenth century, so books were increasingly defined in the terms of
commodity culture by the number of sales. Successful sales, moreover,
engendered other commodities. George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), itself a
tale of the lifestyles, aesthetic and commercial artifices of late nineteenth-
century culture, offers a fine example of the ‘spin-off’. Not only did the
novel create a public demand for hats (trilbies), it caused a ‘Trilby craze’
that led to du Maurier being bombarded with fan mail and a series of
requests to patent Trilby songs, Trilby shoes and even a Trilby kitchen
range.4 Lifestyle in the novel, one of the aspects of bestselling fiction’s
appeal, spills over to influence lifestyles outside it.
In the twentieth century, more books were read by more people than at any
earlier time in history. The mass of readers, of course, equates readily with the
rise of mass marketing and mass media, from newsprint and magazines to
cinema and television. Even in this period, in which records of sales figures
are more widely circulated and attended to than in the nineteenth century, the
bestseller does not seem to map solely onto economic and quantifiable
models. John Sutherland’s extensive study of bestselling fiction in the 1970s
examines the role of genres, book clubs, advertising and television in making
162
a bestseller and offers case studies of some of the most impressive publishing
events of the decade. Star Wars, ‘less a novel than a market strategy’, ‘came as
a Twentieth Century Fox film, and a range of book, pictorial and print items’
and in the form of ‘LP records and myriad wall posters, comics, drinks, drinks
vessels, toy laser guns, models, board games’.5 Money comes to take the lead
in producing a publishing ‘event’.
With money in the driving seat, ‘good literature’ becomes ‘parasitic’ on
popular and bestselling fiction, the latter funding what would otherwise be
an unprofitable business, trade precisely enabling and sustaining works that
are, on own their terms, imagined to be above commercial exchange.
Economic turbulence – oil crises, recessions and inflation, the costs of
publishing (paper, printing) and available public spending (library cuts)
pushed commercial issues to the fore in the 1970s. These are exacerbated
by new modes of advertising and marketing, first identified with US busi-
ness practices and evident in the different receptions of E. L. Doctorow’s
bestselling novel, Ragtime (1975). Acclaimed by US publishers as an ‘event’
that also had ‘sales longevity’, subjected to a process of ‘total merchandis-
ing’, the work was seen as an unusual and precious hybrid uniting literary
quality and bestselling potential. Excitement was generated by publishers
in advance of publication, and a large advertising budget and huge sales –
in hardback and of the paperback rights – further contributed to its
success, financially and critically in the US, with numerous book-club
selections and a large offer for the film rights. In Britain, a year later, and
despite Macmillan paying a high price for the rights and promoting it
as ‘a bestselling novel of the highest literary quality’, English reviewers
remained unimpressed. A significant part of their resistance was due to
their distaste for a process that exuded overly American styles of marketing:
tacitly, at least, they acknowledged that the strategy was hostile to the more
gentle practices of British publishing.6
Bestsellers have two functions. The first is straightforwardly commercial:
to make money. The second function is, loosely, ‘ideological’, reinforcing
prevailing attitudes and assumptions, reassuring existing norms and values
to the point of indoctrination, or, very occasionally, subverting those norms
and values.7 Maintaining established social-political ideas, the bestseller
also remains comfortably recognisable in its pursuit of mass sales or
responding to changing and anxiety-provoking historical circumstances
through the use of stereotyping and familiar forms. Part of the success of
bestselling fictions lies in their ability to tap a specific cultural nerve and
thereby serve as exercises in the management of social anxieties.
The ideological functions associated with popular genres point in another
direction, one closely related to a question more germane to publishing and
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marketing: what makes a bestseller? What do consumer-readers want?

Genre provides some clues: in forgoing any of the challenges, surprises
or defamiliarisations of literary technique, genre promotes familiarity,
fulfilling preformed expectations from its packaging regarding style, story
and reading conventions.8 Aligned with packaging, therapy, consumption,
genre forms one part of the marketability of popular fiction. In what it
represents (lifestyles) and its spin-offs, it remains close to a world of
commodities. Its interplay of comforting sameness with a small addition
of difference is facilitated by a flexible use of generic and literary interrela-
tionships.9 The case of Trilby’s success is instructive. Its content, negotiating
an exotic lifestyle tempered to social acceptability, conjoined romantic
familiarity and strangeness – new enough, but not too morally or stylistic-
ally adventurous.
The contours of romantic fiction are suitably broad to encompass novelty
and familiarity in a manner readily accessible to the reading public in an
age enamoured with new consumer lifestyles and bohemian decadence.
Romantic fiction is a genre in which connections between ideology and
consumption are explicit, negotiating (and exploiting) the position, expec-
tations, anxieties and desires of women within patriarchy in an often
ambivalent manner: a curiously reflexive and consumerist mode is at work
in the ideological circuit of the romance, since the genre serves ‘to justify the
social placement of women that has led to the very discontent that is the
source of their desire to read romances’.10 Just as marketing identifies and
opens up a demand that its product is designed to fill, so romances stimulate
the desire to consume fiction on the basis of an underlying dissatisfaction.
With the exception of the few popular texts that promote radical issues,
the two functions of economy and ideology complement each other, up to a
point. If one function mapped fully onto the other by way of a thorough
knowledge of genre, that is, applying a formula (as Mills and Boon send out
to prospective writers), it would be easy not only to predict but also to
produce bestsellers at will. Many ‘bestsellers’, of course, never reach a
bestseller list despite meeting all the formulaic requirements. Something else
needs to be added to stimulate the desire of (a sufficient number of) reader-
consumers, something that catches the imagination, differentiates one
bestseller over another, catches the public eye; something perhaps that is
not – or not merely – provided by clever marketing and publicity, or
topicality (celebrity/scandal) and extensive media coverage.
This ‘something else’ is less easy to define, and certainly not in terms
of quantity or material measurement. Clive Bloom argues that a bestseller
‘can never be clearly predicted’ and the status of bestselling author is never
guaranteed since they can always fall back into the ‘morass’ of hopefuls
164
from whence they came. This argument follows a seemingly contradictory

point in respect of popular fiction (defined as the expression of mass,
industrial, consumer society), that it has ‘no necessary relation to mass
sales’ and exists in ‘a perceptual arena’.11 Popular fiction and its bestselling
form, then, is not only material in the sense that it can be quantified, but it is
also more complex and fluid (and certainly more flexible than some ideo-
logical definitions), an imaginary form that can be projected onto and
expressed out of a given set of cultural, aesthetic, social and ideological
factors. In part, the bestseller operates according to a logic of consumer
culture, the very image of a consumable commodity is its contemporaneity.
Consumption, of course, is a fleeting act that uses up and destroys its
objects. In this respect, the bestseller’s generic focus on depicting commo-
dities and lifestyles is significant. Its ‘immediate’ appeal and its taste for
newness lie in this sphere, newness not of artistic innovation but of con-
sumable novelty. But the bestseller is far from being reducible to a tempera-
ture gauge measuring all – in cultural and social terms – that may be of
interest in capturing a contemporary mood but neglecting anything to do
with artistic innovation or invention. Instead, the bestseller may be able to
conjoin cultural climate and aesthetics in a ‘symbiotic’ manner in which
both remain irreducible. Here, popular fiction seems to move beyond its
subordinate status in relation to a literary aesthetic to offer ‘a space in which
imagination must be designed for contemporary tastes’ and towards the
more enduring position of ‘popular myth’.12 As words and sentences move
from the relative fixity of the printed page’s surface, they ‘resurface as the
realisation of that surface, as surface (in film, television or electronic
games) – an unalterable present where nothing can be changed’.13 In an
era which has celebrated the unfixing of printed words in visual media, they
become ‘flickering signifiers’.14 It is curious that the move from page to
screen is accompanied by a sense of an unalterable present. The shift, it
seems, is not simply literal: it is very much the imaginary function of the
screen, a site of projection, reflection, recognition and identification, of
captivation in and by images, which allows the bestseller to achieve its more
lasting effects.
Viewing bestselling fiction as a surface of imagination attuned to popular
tastes pushes categories beyond a modern framework so that distinctions
between high and low culture are, at the very least, blurred, if not rendered
entirely redundant. While aligned with some of the claims of Cultural
Studies or postmodern criticism, this position disavows any invocation of a
higher aesthetic principle or literary value. It presents a more complex, non-
hierarchical and interactive case for the relation of all types of fiction. Not
tied to working-class life or mass culture, as passifying and homogenising
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conditions, the consumer culture that shapes fiction offers a new space of
‘imagination, negotiation, and refusal’. Not only does the emphasis on the
contemporary consumer context of fiction locate it within one strand of
popular postmodernist criticism, the claims for fiction also invoke features
of postmodernist practice, genres having the ‘capacity to be recycled’, to
‘reinvent’ tradition, and in the mode of pastiche, to keep the old alive.15
Excess
The strong critical-aesthetic defence of bestselling fiction embraces the
critiques of high culture launched by Cultural Studies and postmodernism:
the levelling of modern aesthetic categories (notably between high and
popular culture); the role of (generic) recycling and reinvention in the
transformations of traditions (particularly through pastiche); the omnipres-
ence of surfaces. These aspects accord with some of the key aesthetic
features Fredric Jameson identifies with postmodernism while embracing
the dynamism of consumer capitalism (which popular fiction, Bloom says,
‘reflects’), and thereby deflecting other questions important in Jameson’s
analysis (the possibility of a radical history, of critical distance, of political
critique).16 Bloom articulates a curious position between a popular cultural
response to the highness of critiques of mass culture and an acceptance of
consumer capitalism’s incorporation of resistance, ‘refusal’ and regional
specificity.17 It is not, however, the kind of position that Hall’s more
contested, fluid and politically charged sense of the popular proposes.18
While acknowledging a major change in the status, circulation and evalu-
ation of popular fiction, it is ambivalent – like postmodern criticism more
generally – in its ability to provide an alternative explanation of bestselling.
Postmodern hyperreality, in bringing signs and simulacra to the fore, mani-
fests the way that images supplant products and objects in the selling of
commodities (and books) to the point that images assume a life of their
own. Contemporary popular fiction embodies the workings of postmodern
consumption in which image and style (the intangible values of advertising,
say) become the norm if not the insubstantial substance of culture (as way of
life or Thing), absorbing features that were once defining characteristics of
high or avant-garde literature: self-reflexivity and intertextuality.
What were once promoted as literary features no longer establish – as in
parody – the possibility of critical distance or guarantee a literary value
of knowingness, but signal a displacement onto a plane where – through
advertising notably – formal and cultural self-awareness is already a
common practice, a witty involvement of audience self-recognition within
a cultural system that flatters their superiority. Compare two fictions
166
(one literary, the other popular) addressing the visible effects of contemporary
consumer capitalism: ‘there used to be a third-generation Italian restaurant
across the road: it had linen tablecloths and rumpy, strict, black-clad wait-
resses. It’s now a Burger Den. There is already a Burger Hatch on the street.
There is a Burger Shack, too, and a Burger Bower.’19 Money engages with the
social and cultural changes of the 1980s affecting urban life, commercial
habits, attitudes and familial and class alignments. It launches a satire on
encroaching consumerism and branding, its main character diving into the
disgusting delights on offer: during ‘a ninety-minute visit to Pepper’s Burger
world’ he ‘had four Wallies, three Blastfurters, and an American Way, plus a
nine-pack of beer’.20 Toilet and punter, the character, called ‘John Self’, comes
from a dysfunctional working-class London family, works in advertising and
wants to make films and scoffs, puffs, pops, drinks, wanks, fucks and deludes
his way from London to New York and back again.
In Julie Burchill’s S and F novel Ambition, the heroine – screwing her way
to the top – enjoys a New York trip:
on Madison Avenue, at the soft-tech, Italo-Japanese, black beige Armani shop,

she bought black label, and at Krizia she bought sportswear that would have
had a nervous breakdown if one did anything more rigorous than hail a cab.
She avoided Walter Stieger but did succumb to a pair of pewter, lace and
plastic Vittorio Riccis for Zero. She snapped up a brace of six-hundred-dollar
sweaters at Sonia Rykiel and half a dozen pairs of cashmere tights at $178
a throw at Fogal.21
The catalogue of excesses from both novels offer a recognisable account of a

period in which the expenditures of money, time and energy assume a social
and economic predominance to the point that unnecessary spending, waste-
fulness, luxury, indulgence come to be a new norm. Both Amis and Burchill
are responding in different ways to the rampant consumerism of the 1980s
free-market expansion; both are written in Britain and engage with US
imports of values, goods, lifestyles, and can be read as parodies that – from
a national and aesthetic perspective – attempt to sustain an English differ-
ence (in terms of the irony that Americans are supposed to lack) at a
point when their home culture was being doubly whammied by the forces
of popular postmodernism and transnational, consumer capitalism. Both
novels present the new market culture in the forms of escalating (shopping)
lists of consumer commodities, a succession of purchases and acts of
consumption that become increasingly useless and excessive and – possibly –
ridiculous. Neither the literary work nor the work of trash popular culture
(the ‘shopping and fucking’ genre of romance that appeared at the time)
manages to sustain a clear remove from the world they depict. In the latter,
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mimicking a tale of trial and ordeal, like Hercules or ‘O’, the heroine has
to undertake a series of increasingly difficult challenges. As trash fiction, it
is certainly reflexively aware of itself in a celebratory and insubordinate
way. The former is too supercilious in its dismissal of the brand names of
corporate culture (the Ford ‘Fiasco’ for instance) to offer convincing dis-
tance or to disguise its contempt. The possibility of an outside, superior and
moralising position (that of irony or parody) is, in the encounter with an
all-embracing and displacing cultural change, difficult to perceive and to
maintain, since both novelists also seem enamoured with the new mobility
of commerce and class.
In the ‘postmodern condition’ economic and technological imperatives
reshape cultures. Repetition of aesthetic modes (nostalgia, pastiche, subli-
mity) occurs in a new context, one no longer supported by grand narratives:
the unifying frameworks articulating economy, society and subjectivity –
Science, Religion, Humanism, Culture, Patriarchy – collapse into small
narratives, language games competing for legitimacy in a period when
authorising frameworks are no longer credible. Aesthetic, political and moral
judgements are displaced by technoscience and economic performance, level-
ling categories, systems of differentiation and hierarchies, evacuating orders
sustaining social cohesion. The ‘vast and anarchic’, ‘multi-channelled and
complex’ non-hierarchical space of Bloom’s contemporary popular consumer
culture is viewed differently (and more like a culture critic) by Lyotard as he
finds parallels between aesthetic and consumer practice: ‘eclecticism is the
degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches
a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner,
wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong’. Art becomes
kitsch and ‘artists, gallery owners, critics, and the public wallow together
in the “anything goes”, and the epoch is one of slackening. But this realism of
the “anything goes” is in fact that of money’.22 Money becomes the sole
criterion for evaluating – and speculating on – art (the rise of art auctions in
the 1980s with huge sums being paid for Matisses, Monets, Van Goghs by
corporate art collector-investors).
In the absence of hierarchical systems of categorisation and differenti-
ation, anything goes, a flattening or levelling that appears democratic and
anti-elitist, but transforms aesthetic codes and works in the interests of a
corporate and technocratic mode of social and economic functioning.
Innovation changes its meaning, working more like generic mutation: ‘the
novelty of an unexpected “move”, with its correlative displacement of a
partner or group of partners, can supply the system with that increased
performativity it forever demands and consumes’.23 Performance (in the
sense of performance targets and performance-related pay) becomes
168
a determining criterion. Following the rules established by information

theory, the postmodern condition is distinguished by the models provided
by cybernetics and code, with culture, reason and morality ceding to
‘a generalized spirit of performativity’, without reference to aesthetic, legal
or rational modes of judgement.24 ‘Excellence’ or ‘quality’ manifest the
operations of this system of equivalence and general integration, having
‘the singular advantage of being entirely meaningless’, evacuation allowing
for the increasing integration of all activities into a ‘generalized market’.25
The generalisation of market practices – reversing, evacuating and trans-
forming all categories and modes of judgement – comes to absorb literary
values as well. Opposing art and popular fiction in an attack on the
‘tyranny of the bestsellers’, the author Fay Weldon sees the dominance of
bestsellers as an assault on artistic integrity, imagination, creativity, indi-
viduality and complexity, and perpetuated not only by pressures to be
popular in order to sell, but by a culture in which visual media predominate
and publishers are guided by synopses, committees and marketing impera-
tives which force them to play safely to the gallery. As a result, the writer
is now perceived as writing – not for art’s sake – but (as fiction prizes
multiply), ‘writing to win the Prize’, a ‘race for celebrity’.26 In reiterating
observations that bestsellers and their writers have only one function (to
make money for their publishers), Weldon situates herself on the side of an
elite, literary culture threatened by mass sales. She does, however, note a
shift in values in which the very notion of quality (she uses the word
‘excellence’) has already changed:
‘bestseller’ betokens artistic success. It is the publishers’ ultimate accolade.

If enough others like it, the suggestion is, so will you. Popularity becomes the
measuring stick. A ‘good’ book is, by inference, an easy book. A ‘good’ book is
one that sells.
Art equals money, it seems. So does celebrity (airtime; column inches;

attention). There is no other criterion.
Weldon used to work in advertising (‘Go to work on an egg’ was attri-
buted to her) and her professional response to the situation she analyses
is curious in that it reinforces the position she attacks in her piece on
bestsellers: in 2001 she published The Bulgari Connection, a novel regularly
mentioning, paid for and distributed by the jewellery designers and retailers,
Bulgari. It was initially printed in a lavish edition and exclusively marketed to
the firm’s customers. Literature – to the horror and amusement of reviewers,
cedes to the allure of ‘product placement’.27 Weldon’s literary agent, however,
was unapologetic: ‘just explain to me why it is more contemptible to be paid
by an Italian jewellery firm than by HarperCollins? It’s still money.’28 While
169
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the move certainly takes her work out of a popular circuit dominated by sales
and media and into a realm in which the uselessness and non-productive
nature of artistic elitism collides with an elitism based on the access provided
by wealth (jewellery forms the apex of a commercial culture’s luxurious
expenditure on commodities that do very little – have low use-value – but
cost a great deal). The association, however, does not take literature out of an
economic and commercial circuit: the elite and exclusive audience for literary
productions is not based on taste or sophistication, only on purchasing
power. Art still equals money (just more money).
The evacuation that accompanies the levelling and reversal of cultural
categories forms the locus for the generation of exploitable desires. New
modes of excess and desiring come to the fore. Late capitalism is ‘a society
of services and information, of a flow of desire’ that ‘encourages excessive
expenditure’ and requires an ‘evacuation of sense’.29 Flow, of course, is also
the rhythm of TV30 and postmodernism, and advertising and branding
involve emptying and refilling cultural meanings with corporate ones.
A ‘takeover’ of culture is enabled through a process of evacuation in which
meaning is first emptied out and then invested in corporate logos. Symbolic
economies – as in the marketing of Nike – use immaterial values (signs,
slogans, images, brand identities) and signal an abstraction and autonomis-
ation of values and meanings to the point that monetary forms are detached
from social realities and fixed structures (the gold standard) to occupy
an increasingly separate, mechanical and flexible (financial) sphere.
‘Postmodern capitalism’ confirms the blurring of moral, rational and
aesthetic categories and distinctions and underlines the manner in which
innovative aesthetics have been co-opted by the market. Postmodern capi-
talism creates desire (and sales and profits) through the ‘invention of the
new’, the business entrepreneur the locus of ‘all true light and creativity’.31
Capitalism itself hollows out a space for endlessly exploitable desiring: what
Angela Carter describes as the secret of desire – the ‘logic of the inexhaust-
ible plus’ – appears as its operating principle.32 The logic extends from
goods and commodities to people: not only is the entrepreneur a giver and
creator, but, as artist, a role model: ‘we are all’, so the new economic system
declares, ‘structurally and ontologically, proletarians, women and artists’.33
A ‘generalized ontological aesthetization’ comes into operation, removing
‘from the artist any particular location at the moment that his activity
becomes the paradigm of all activity’.34 ‘Creativity’, so an advertising
agency announces, ‘is ordinary’.35 It is not necessarily an emancipatory
idea: like the mobiles and wireless laptops that confer spatial freedom, it
leaves all workers permanently accessible and on call. Without pension,
benefits or job security, forever innovating and reinventing his/her skills
170
profile to win the next portfolio, the artist-worker marches at the vanguard
of a legion of new model performance-related ‘creatives’.36
As creativity, vision, imagination move from a restricted realm of artistic
production to become the paradigm of new economic activity, literature
(both and neither high or popular) begins to circulate very differently:
‘Literature no longer operates most effectively in “literature”, but every-
where else . . . the life that once animated literature as an effect of its poiesis
(the source of its “creativity”) has departed the heritage museum of literary
study. At the same time, the language of creativity, beauty, poetic originality,
and vision . . . have become integral to general economic, commercial, and
technological thinking.’37 In a ‘post-literary culture’, literature cedes to
‘econopoiesis’, a mode of ‘writing excess’, can be found in stadia, offices,
online and on screens, anywhere, it seems, other than the book, a displace-
ment in which poiesis is economised and constantly (like co-branding)
requires allopoiesis – an ‘interaction with components outside itself’ –
to engender little moments of innovation and ‘creative’ differentiation.38
‘Post-literary’ culture refers not only to a situation in which reading and
printed materials are displaced by visual and electronic media but to a
broader shift in economic and cultural values and practices. One of the
slogans for ‘post-literary’ culture comes from the Death Metal band,
Slipknot: ‘people ¼ shit’. Art equals money and literature equals money,
money the measure of performance and worth: the result of the abstrac-
tion is that humans and human values (Humanity having been the central,
superior and sacred concern of Modern Literature and Culture) are
rendered redundant by new economic performance tables and targets,
supplanted by the networked machine of (creative) global capital. The
excess that guarantees the same in this order of general equivalence
demands a constant interaction beyond restricted boundaries: if art ¼
money, poetry ¼ commerce, art ¼ kitsch, kitsch ¼ money, and literature ¼
creativity ¼ excellence ¼ celebrity ¼ money, the circuit requires something
extra, something ‘aneconomic’39 or allopoietic, to keep it circulating, to keep
desire and consumption turning.
As markets generalise themselves on the basis of creative additions, the
sphere of fiction is transformed: the literature that defined itself in relation
to popular fiction is exported throughout the economy. Literariness –
poiesis – comes from any addition. Take the British celebrity Jordan (Katie
Price) whose fourth – ghostwritten – novel, Sapphire, sold 70,000 copies
between July and September 2009, more than the entire Booker shortlist.
This ‘humiliation of literary fiction’ repeats the success of her second
novel, Crystal, though books are just a ‘minor adjunct’ to the ‘Katie Price
celebrity industry’.40 Glamour model þ TV celebrity þ tabloid front-page
171
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love-life þ fiction ¼ bestseller. Take Tom Bradby, television news reporter,

ITV political editor, ‘media confidant’ of the young royals and successful
fiction writer.41 Media visibility þ networks þ fiction ¼ country house with
swimming pool. Take Richard and Judy, until recently TV chat show hosts
(on Channel 4 and UKTV) who transformed the book-group phenomenon
with their own televised version. Between 2004 and 2009, the show had
selected 100 books and was responsible for selling 30.3 million copies.
It also had significant effects on general sales of works and backlists by
the featured writers. Before Simon Kernick’s novel Relentless was fea-
tured, his four titles sold fewer than 260 copies a week; afterwards his
average weekly sale rose to 9,000. Indeed, the reading-group novel almost
becomes a separate genre itself, as well as a novel: Elizabeth Noble, The
Reading Group (2005). To close the circuit, Judy Finnigan, taking time out
of her media career, is said to be planning to write a novel. Reading
groups þ book-club selection þ daytime television exposure þ chain
bookseller and supermarket distribution ¼ money. But no writer equals
money like J. K. Rowling: Forbes business magazine places her well at the
head of bestselling writers with an annual income of £160 million (over six
times higher than her nearest rivals – James Patterson, Stephen King, Tom
Clancy, Danielle Steel): the Harry Potter series has earned £375m globally,
with the first five films bringing in another £2.2 billion. Rowling is presented
in the same way that her fictions appeal to a nostalgia for a world of class
order and institutional security (the boarding-school setting) and a magical
confidence that things will turn out well in the end. The ‘events’ that accom-
pany the publication of a new Rowling novel follow a similar pattern: queues
of people, cheery and often dressed as characters, spring up outside book-
shops to wait all night, un-self-consciously replicating the stereotype of the
British affection for queuing as manifested at comparable events, Wimbledon,
say, or the Harrods January sale. Nostalgia þ fiction þ film þ event ¼
sales ¼ wealth ¼ celebrity ¼ success ¼ more sales . . . equals money.
Bestselling, it seems, now follows the poietic logic of postmodern capita-
lism, subjected to a need for an additional same-difference, for a ‘plus’ that
keeps the economic circuit circulating and returning to the performative
criteria of monetary evaluation. But the model is not internal to an economy
of fiction in which generic change and differentiation produces the slight
hybrids of formula constituting the innovations that appeal to consumer
desire: like anything else (from product differentiation to co-branding),
alteration and novelty – and desire – are produced externally, in interrela-
tions across and beyond specific fields, new moves in a networked game, a
demand for more in a borderless transnational market of exchanges, equival-
ences, additions and flows. Plus.
172
NOTES
1 Laura Marcus, ‘Oedipus Express: Trains, Trauma and Detective Fiction’, new forma-
tions 41 (2000): 173–88; Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin 1961), p. 73.
2 Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester University Press,
1998), pp. 25–7.
3 John Sutherland, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (London: Athlone, 1978),
pp. 6–7.
4 Leonée Ormond, George du Maurier (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969),
p. 464.
5 John Sutherland, Bestsellers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 88.
6 Ibid., pp. 63–76.
7 Ibid., p. 34.
8 Ibid., pp. 192–3.
9 Fiona Gilmore (ed.), Brand Warriors (London: HarperCollins, 1999).
10 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 217.
11 Clive Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900 (Basingstoke and London:
Palgrave, 2002), p. 17.
12 Ibid., pp. 16, 23.
13 Ibid., p. 23.
14 Katherine N. Hayles, ‘Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers’, October 66
(1993): 69–91.
15 Ibid., pp. 13, 17, 25.
16 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’,
New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92.
17 See Thomas Frank, One Market Under God (London: Secker and Warburg,
2001).
18 Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.),
People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 277–94.
19 Martin Amis, Money (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 70–1.
20 Ibid., p. 29.
21 Julie Burchill, Ambition (London: Corgi Books, 1990), p. 252.
22 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. G. Bennington and
B. Massumi (Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 76.
23 Ibid., p. 15.
24 Ibid., pp. 44–5.
25 See Bill Readings, ‘For a Heteronomous Cultural Politics: The University,
Culture and the State’, Oxford Literary Review 15 (1993): 168; and Fred
Botting, ‘Culture and Excellence’, Cultural Values 1:2 (1997): 139–58.
26 Fay Weldon, ‘The Tyranny of the Bestsellers’, The Times, 10 February 2007,
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_
review.
27 Alex Clark, ‘Diamond Geyser’, The Guardian, 6 October 2001, www.guardian.
co.uk/books/2001oct/06/fiction.fayweldon; Rachel Cooke, Review of The
Bulgari Connection, New Statesman, 15 October 2001, www.newstatesman.
com/200110150046.
173
fred botting
28 Cited in Maev Kennedy, ‘Jewellers Sponsor Fay Weldon’s Latest Literary Gem’,
Guardian, 4 September 2001, www.guardian.co.uk/2001/sep/04/publishing.
fiction/print.
29 Dana Polan, ‘Brief Encounters: Mass Culture and the Evacuation of Sense’, in
Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass
Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 178, 183.
30 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2003), p. 86.
31 Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘General Economics and Postmodern Polemics’, Yale French
Studies 78 (1990b): 212.
32 Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (London: Penguin,
1982), p. 267.
33 Ibid.
34 Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘Subversion and Consensus: Proletarians, Women, Artists’, in
Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood (eds.), Terror and Consensus
(Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 49–50.
35 FishCanSing, CreativeWorld: the FishCanSing Guide to the New Creative
Economy (London and New York: TheFishCanSingLtd, 2005).
36 Angela McRobbie, ‘“Everyone is Creative”: Artists as New Economic
Pioneers?’, openDemocracy, 29 August 2001: www.opendemocracy.net/node/
652.
37 Scott Wilson, ‘Writing Excess: The Poetic Principle and Post-literary Culture’, in
Patricia Waugh (ed.), Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford
University Press, 2006), p. 560.
38 Ibid., pp. 562–3.
39 Jacques Derrida, Given Time, trans. Peggy Kamuf (University of Chicago
Press, 1992).
40 David Sexton, ‘Katie Price Knows How to Kiss and Sell’, London Evening
Standard, 2 September 2009: www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-23739112-
katie-price-knows-how-to-kiss-and-sell.do.
41 Ian Burrell, ‘Tom Bradby: Smooth Operator’, The Independent, 12 March 2007:
http://license.icopyright.net/user/newFreeUSe.act?=fuid=NDK2MJKONQ%3D53D.
174
10
H I L L A RY C H U T E A N D M A R I A N N E D E K O V E N
Comic books and graphic novels
The first thing to say about comics – plural in form, used with a singular
verb – is that it is a medium, not a genre.1 While comics has often been
understood to be a lowbrow genre it is increasingly recognised as a powerful
form of expression and communication in its own right, fashioning words
and images, and, crucially, panels and ‘gutters’, on the printed page. In
technical terms, panels are the framed moments in which a comics story
unfolds, and they are separated by the blank space of the gutter, a space that
allows the reader to project causality between frames. As for any medium,
such as film, it is now standard to treat comics as singular.2 And, like other
media, comics has given rise to a variety of different formats – including
comic strips, comic books and graphic novels – and also a profusion of
genres, from superhero and war stories to teen romances. However, while
there is a booming commercial (i.e. genre-based) comics market, today the
form is remarkably unconstrained by genre expectations. Comics narratives
exist in spaces both esoteric, as in the recent growth of the abstract comics
movement, and wholly public, such as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s
Watchmen, and Frank Miller’s Sin City, both recently popularised by
Hollywood film adaptations.3
A pre-history of comics includes figures such as the English artist William
Hogarth, whose famous sequential paintings, later published as portfolios
of engravings, including ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ (1731) and ‘A Rake’s Pro-
gress’ (1734), present a narrative through a series of images. Hogarth’s
images were designed to be viewed side by side, unlike comics, which
usually presents multiple frames on one page. Yet by introducing a novel-
istic structure to a pictorial form, especially one that could be printed and
disseminated, Hogarth inspired the expansion of narrative visual forms.
When Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846), a Swiss schoolmaster who invented
the main conventions of modern comics, created his seven histoires en
estampes (‘engraved novels’) published between 1833 and 1845, he described
his work as drawing on two forms: the novel and the ‘picture-stories’ of
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hillary chute and marianne dekoven
Hogarth.4 Decades before the invention of film, Töpffer devised the tech-
nique of cross-cutting. Significantly, Töpffer also unfolded his narratives
by pairing his panels with captions that were handwritten. Like contem-
porary comics authors today, he was aware of comics as a pictorial
language in which the drawing is an aspect of the writing, and the writing
is an aspect of the drawing. (We will use ‘author’ and ‘cartoonist’ inter-
changeably here.) Töpffer used a primitive version of offset lithography
that enabled him to draw and write ‘right reading’: he could make the
same kind of marks for his writing as for his drawing without executing
his work backwards, as required by engraving. Thus Töpffer was the first
cartoonist to truly produce what cartoonist Art Spiegelman calls ‘picture
writing’ and cartoonist Marjane Satrapi calls ‘narrative drawing’. Comics
is not about illustration, but rather about words and images together
moving a narrative forward.
The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (the author
of Faust among other famous texts), whose associates Johann Peter
Eckermann and Frédéric Soret presented him with several of Töpffer’s
satirical manuscripts before his death in 1832, was highly enthusiastic about
this new narrative form, identifying the mass-culture potential of what had
come to be called Töpffer’s ‘picture-novels’. ‘If for the future, he would
choose a less frivolous subject and restrict himself a little,’ Goethe declared,
‘he would produce things beyond all conception.’5 This was a notable move
for someone with a well-known contempt for what he saw as the socially
divisive malice of caricature. For while Töpffer created a pictorial language
based on the relationship of frames on the page – sequentiality – caricature
is mostly single-frame, and usually suggests a representation of a specific
person. Adam Gopnik and Kirk Varnedoe, in their catalogue for the famed
1990 art show, High & Low, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
suggest that Goethe saw Töpffer’s picture-novels as ‘a new mode of cultural
reconciliation – a popular form that could make a big, anonymous society
feel like a family’.6 Töpffer himself argued: ‘with its dual advantage of
greater conciseness and greater relative clarity, the picture story, all things
being equal, should squeeze out the other because it would address itself
with greater liveliness to a greater number of minds’.7 Even in this early
incarnation, comics was understood as an anti-elitist art form.
As even the brief trajectory established by placing Hogarth alongside
Töpffer in the development of comics demonstrates, the expansion of the
form was and is inextricably linked with developments in print culture.
Spiegelman, one of the most globally famous living cartoonists, and
certainly one of the few most significant authors of America’s boomer
generation, claims, simply, ‘The history of comics is the history of
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printing.’8 Yet despite its auspicious European beginnings – especially for

long-format narrative work – it was in the US that comics actually took off
as a mass-market phenomenon, in the form of comic strips in the sensa-
tional newspapers around the turn of the nineteenth century. The comic
strip is a comics segment that can be a minimal unit or a story that is a page
or more. While word balloons had been present in Europe for some time,
from the phylactery (inscribed scroll) seen in medieval art to the ‘labels’
or ‘banners’ of nineteenth-century English satirical illustrator George
Cruikshank, among others such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson,
they were conventionalised for comics in the early days of the American
strip by figures such as Frederick Burr Opper, most famous for Happy
Hooligan, and Richard Fenton Outcault.9
The impetus for the publication of strips in America came from major
newspaper companies. The inception of Outcault’s inaugural strip, known
as the Yellow Kid, in 1895 is traceable to the fact that Joseph Pulitzer’s
New York World owned a four-colour rotary press. Thus between 1895 and
1896 the Yellow Kid moved from a single panel cartoon to a progressive
series of panels that would become the definitive comic ‘strip’.10 But the
launching of comic supplements in the Sunday editions of ‘sensational’ urban
newspapers preceded America’s first comic strips. These supplements – which
drew on the idioms of American illustrated humour that appeared in places
like Puck, Life and Judge – offered illustrated material but lacked continuing
characters or comics conventions such as word balloons. Outcault had
been drawing scenarios of street urchins for the Sunday colour supplement
of the World and eventually developed a continuing character: an impudent,
bald, jug-eared grinning child who lived in Hogan’s Alley. When one of his
illustrations was printed with the nightshirt of the boy coloured yellow, the
first American comics character was born. Pulitzer quickly realized that
the Yellow Kid, named by his audience, rather than by Outcault himself,
was a circulation booster. By the end of 1895, for the Sunday edition of
the World, circulation averaged half a million copies – an almost 100 per cent
increase over 1891.11 In October 1896, William Randolph Hearst – not to be
outdone – started a comic supplement in his New York Journal. He had also
bought Outcault from Pulitzer. Hearst memorably boasted that his supple-
ment’s outlandish colour would be ‘eight pages of iridescent polychromous
effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a piece of lead pipe’.12 Ugly
bidding wars ensued in the sensational press: Pulitzer bought Outcault back;
Hearst outbid him again; Pulitzer, ever savvy, hired another artist, George
Luks, to draw the Kid, as no copyright had been established. This struggle
gave birth to the term ‘yellow journalism’ – so named after the Kid and his
instantly recognisable yellow gown.13
177
1 Dream of the Rarebit Fiend by Winsor McCay # Woody Gelman Collection, The Ohio State
University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.
What is fascinating about comics’ inception in popular newspapers is that

almost as soon as comics conventions were established, they were broken;
the form dynamically created its structures and sent them up at once. Comic
strips were vital and sophisticated, and they also existed completely in a
mainstream commercial context. Several American comic strips represent
an aesthetic high point in the history of comics, such as Winsor McCay’s
Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–11); George Herriman’s Krazy Kat
178
2 Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay # Woody Gelman Collection, The Ohio
State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.
(1913–44) and Lyonel Feininger’s The Kin-der-Kids (1906) and Wee Willie
Winkie’s World (1906–7). We will focus briefly on McCay, because his
oeuvre, particularly his full-colour, full-page Sunday Little Nemo strips,
enacts the productive contradictions that comics has always embodied.
Indeed, an unresolved tension at the level of form, a characteristic paradigm
of modernism, is the lens through which it is most helpful to think of
McCay’s work. In McCay’s comics, one can identify a host of tensions –
between mass printing and artisanal practice, between convention and
modernist experimentation, between the distancing control of comics con-
straints and the eruptive fantasy of dreaming – that register on the level of
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formal invention. The New York Times art critic, Michael Kimmelman,
recently argued that McCay was as innovative an artist as America had at
the turn of the century, yet comics blossomed in America in newspapers that
were meant to be utterly disposable.
McCay’s work began appearing in newspapers in 1904. It represents a
foundational formal architecture – attention to the total visual space of the
page as the essential unit of information. In fact, Spiegelman claims that he
could not have composed his Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus: A Survivor’s Tale
(1986; 1991) without the architectonic rigour of McCay’s example. In Little
Sammy Sneeze, which ran in James Bennett Jr’s New York Herald, McCay
played with the conventions of the comics form: in one significant strip,
Little Sammy’s disruptive sneeze first breaks, and then fully shatters to
pieces, the black square frame that encloses him. The Story of Hungry
Henrietta, which ran in 1905, is about the rapid ageing of a female infant
to whom no one pays attention except to overfeed. In the experimental and
disturbing Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (a Herald strip from 1904 to 1911),
a shifting cast of characters who have recently eaten a meal of Welsh rarebit
are plagued by nightmares, which include scenarios such as the dreamer
dismembered by traffic on the city street, or helplessly buried alive (the
perspective is given to the supine dead). The more overtly sanitised, visually
lovely and Art Nouveau-inflected Little Nemo in Slumberland has the same
structure as Rarebit Fiend: each weekly instalment reports on the dream
state of a character – in this case, a child named Nemo (Latin for ‘no one’) –
who wakes up, disoriented, in a concluding frame.14
While breaking the frame is one technique, as we see in Little Sammy
Sneeze, McCay’s attention to aesthetic form also involves how his pages work
to push and pull the syntax of the medium. This is evident in the debut
appearance of Little Nemo on 15 October 1905, a comics page that was likely
created in conversation with experiments in chronophotography, particularly
Eadweard Muybridge’s Horses in Motion (1878). From day one of Little
Nemo, McCay defied the strip’s traditional arrangement of panels, extending
them horizontally. In addition to its multiple, evocative images of horses
stretching forward, the strip’s panels of Nemo falling through the air against
the black atmosphere can be read as a response to Etienne-Jules Marey’s
obsession with documenting the kinetic sequence of the human body in
motion. McCay elongates the width of comics panels in order to make the
page’s composition irregular. His fantasy registers its disruption to the norma-
tive social order – represented by Muybridge and Marey’s mapping of animal
and human bodies – not only as content but, more significantly, as form.
Little Nemo became a multimedia event: it was adapted as an operetta
(1908), and in 1911 Vitagraph released McCay’s first animated film, Little
180
Nemo, for which he drew roughly 5,000 sketches. McCay became one of
the early important innovators of American animation but later criticised
the use of efficiency-motivated machine advancements in the animation
process, essentially aligning himself with the handcraft – the handwritten-
ness, so to speak – that was a hallmark of comics production and remains
one of the defining features of what might now be thought of as ‘independ-
ent’ or ‘literary’ comics, a subject to which we will return. We can also
understand McCay’s focus on repetition, the constant dreaming–waking,
dreaming–waking movement of his work, as itself a rebuke to a culture
predicated on modern efficiency and forward movement. In the example of
McCay, we see how comics developed not only alongside innovations in
other mass media like photography, film and animation, but also how
comics, while designed and produced as popular ephemera, formalise con-
cerns also present in the more elite spaces of literary and visual modernism.
The modernist narrative strategies in comics are expressive of a register of
oppositionality, and should be seen as harnessing the same energies as the
historical avant-garde, as Michael Chabon’s prize-winning novel about
Second-World-War-era cartoonists, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier
and Clay (2000) also suggests. Yet comics were indubitably vulgar – and
‘vulgar’ in this context is vernacular rather than low; demotic rather than
coarse or uncultured.
The medium of comics began a huge ascent in 1929 in the form of comic
books, the landmark year of The Funnies and the beginning of the Great
Depression. The Funnies, published by Dell, was the first full-colour news-
stand publication of original comic strips that were not reprinted from the
newspapers. Publishers had experimented for years with different formats
for comics republication, based on the popularity of the Sunday comics
supplements. But largely because of its awkward tabloid size, which mim-
icked the newspaper, The Funnies failed the following year. In 1933, comic
books approximately the same physical format as today’s were published as
free giveaways, produced as premiums for retailers and manufacturers. But
when M.C. Gaines, a salesman at Eastern Color, tested the market by
introducing a 10-cent price tag, the comic books sold out. Famous Funnies
No. 1, a reprint collection, appeared in May 1934, sold for a dime, and soon
began monthly publication; in 1935 New Fun No. 1 entered the scene,
offering new material.
But comic books did not enter public consciousness and widely affect
consumer practices until the creation of the superhero in 1938. Comic
books delivered superhero culture and developed an instantaneously popu-
lar and durable genre of comics that is uniquely American – there are no
indigenous superhero comics, for example, in Europe predating the 1960s.
181
One might say that comic books began their ascent on the back of Super-
man, whose inaugural title, Action Comics No. 1, altered comics history and
ushered in what is known as the ‘Golden Era’ of comic books (1938–54).
Shortly thereafter, Action Comics sold almost a million copies each month,
the bimonthly spin-off comic book Superman sold over a million copies per
issue, and the character saturated all entertainment media, generating
a daily comic strip that ran in 230 papers, and also appearing in radio
and the movies.15 By 1942, there were 15 million comic books sold each
month.16 The comic book became, before rock’n’roll, the first wide-scale
youth-directed mass-market entertainment phenomenon. And while super-
hero comics were key to this phenomenon – superheroes from the start were
responsive to contemporary politics and culture, and even went to war; Jack
Kirby’s famous 1941 cover of Captain America shows the titular hero
punching Hitler – many, many genres of comic books blossomed, such as,
to name just a few, romance comics, horror comics, crime comics, funny
animal comics and comics devoted to adapting literature, in the form of the
widely read Classic Comics series (which later became Classics Illustrated).
Unlike newspaper comic strips, which were generally the product of one
artist’s vision, comic books became their own commercial industry, and,
meeting high demand, were produced quickly and cheaply by teams of
people. Will Eisner, a cartoonist who started his career in one of the first
so-called comic-book sweatshops producing comics ‘the way Ford turned
out cars’, recalled: ‘I would write and design the characters, somebody else
would pencil them in, somebody else would ink, somebody else would
letter.’17
But while comic books sprang into existence, visualising a whole host
of word and image narratives, some quite sexy, violent and boundary-
breaking, as well as aspirational and didactic, another precursor to today’s
graphic novel also developed alongside the cheap, disposable comic book
format, which was typically thirty-two pages long. ‘Wordless books’, also
known as woodcut novels, began appearing in Europe around 1919.18 The
first is considered to be Belgian Frans Masereel’s Passionate Journey, which
earned the ardent admiration of acclaimed novelist Thomas Mann, who
lauded its forceful democratic appeal, much as Goethe had praised Töpffer’s
visual narratives.19 And at the same time that America developed the comic
book, so these early examples of serious, book-length graphic narrative
were beginning to find a place in American culture. 1929 saw not only the
publication of The Funnies but also comics in another, more explicitly
literary form developed concurrently on a different track: Gods’ Man: A
Novel in Woodcuts, a graphic narrative comprising 139 pictures, rendered
by wood-engraving, printed one to a page, and completely conceived and
182
executed by Lynd Ward. This mode of comics authorship established Ward

as a direct antecedent to today’s graphic narrative authors. Gods’ Man was
published by the house of Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith and appeared
the week of the Stock Market Crash in October 1929. It was a critical – and
commercial – success. Ward published five subsequent ‘wordless novels’
(although called ‘wordless’, these works often did incorporate text, but
did not offer conventional captions or speech balloons). Gods’ Man, his
first book-length published work, might be considered the first graphic
novel produced in America. Ward’s novels innovated – and were a part
of – a tradition of socialist wordless novels of the 1920s and ’30s, which
included the work of Masereel; Otto Nückel, a German; and the American
Giacomo Patri. These novels were expressionist, and largely composed in
black and white with stark contrasts in colour.
From the opposite side of the spectrum to McCay’s newspaper strips,
Ward’s Vertigo (1937), considered his masterpiece, also makes legible the
mix of modes and registers that informs comics culture and accounts for so
much of its vitality. McCay’s work appeared in ephemeral newspapers;
Ward’s appeared in bookstores. McCay had a background in vaudeville;
Ward had a background in fine arts, with a degree from Leipzig’s National
Academy for Graphic Arts. The modernist and mass-produced Vertigo is an
experimental, political work that was published by Random House and
marketed as a conventional novel around the same time that the first comic
books appeared on news-stands. In the 230-woodblock Vertigo, which,
when it was published, offered only one panel on each page, printed on
only one side of the leaf, the artist struggled with how to use form experi-
mentally in order to express the despair of the Depression. Three unnamed
characters – a girl, a boy and an elderly gentleman – are at the centre of
the book, in a narrative free of words except for those carried on signs
within individual panels, such as ‘Fight For the Union – The Union Fights
For You’. Ward plays with the rules of panelisation, composing Vertigo’s
narrative in four distinct panel sizes: small, medium, large-square and
jumbo-rectangular. No one frame of reference, Ward seems to suggest, is
fixed; there is no one ‘normal’ view of the world. His focus on form as the
register of traumatic representation – as opposed to letting this representa-
tion rest with the book’s verisimilitude, its content – is one that predates the
self-reflexive formal experiments of such contemporary graphic narratives
as Spiegelman’s Maus and Joe Sacco’s Palestine.
Ward’s pioneering work, and Vertigo most obviously, makes clear that the
American graphic novel was political in both its content and its shaping of
representation from its very inception. On a basic aesthetic level graphic
novels differed drastically from comic books, since Ward was a ‘virtuoso’
183
artist; early comic-book artists were largely interchangeable, paid-for-hire

workers valued for speedy ‘production’, not ‘artistic’, values. Yet historic-
ally both forms are contoured by working-class politics: the boy hero of
Vertigo aspires to work construction, while Superman demolishes an unsafe
housing project. Whether produced in a comics ‘sweatshop’ or produced
single-handedly by an acclaimed illustrator with a fine arts background,
comics were from the start geared towards political representations. Vertigo
belongs to a mass cultural form that is at once experimental (especially at
the level of its complex structure, which prevents any smooth reading) and
conventional (drawing on genre material, such as its Boy–Girl romance
plot) and this popular yet modernist text is an important precursor to the
contemporary graphic narrative.
Across different formats and formal contours, the narrative vehicle of
comics integrates features of high and mass, modernist and ‘lowbrow’
modes, mixing stark oppositionality with mainstream cultural appeal,
anti-realist aesthetics with popular narrative convention. This became es-
pecially apparent in the 1950s and 1960s, when the landscape of ‘main-
stream’ and ‘commercial’ comics began to change radically, and new styles
and audiences emerged. American comics culture was curbed by the intro-
duction of a strict federal censorship code in 1954, geared towards elimin-
ating the violence and sexuality represented in comic books. The Comics
Code ended the ‘Golden Age’ of comic books and public gatherings to burn
comic books took place throughout the US. The link between comics and
juvenile delinquency was the subject of heated discussion, as was the dubi-
ous idea that comic books posed a threat to literacy. Yet Mad Comics:
Humor in a Jugular Vein (later Mad magazine), the brainchild of cartoonist
Harvey Kurtzman, offering perhaps the most incisive and devastating satire
in any medium of postwar American culture, remained essentially untouched
by the Code. Nevertheless, from 1957 to 1971 there were thirty-six FBI
files on Mad.20 Part of Mad’s genius was its deep self-awareness of its form;
it was preoccupied with sending up comics aesthetics through the form
of comics, with decrying ‘the media’ while alerting the reader to the fact that
it was part of the media.
But while Mad flourished, and influenced a legion of cartoonists, the
Code forced many cartoonists to publish their work outside the main-
stream, especially those who had been politicised by 1960s left-wing cul-
ture, and were interested in extending the experimentalism of earlier forms
and styles of comics. Europe, and in particular its strong Franco-Belgian
comics culture, did not have to contend with a glut of ill-produced super-
hero comics, as America did, or an overzealously censorious regulation
code, but it also failed to develop a home-grown underground comics, or
184
‘comix’, culture comparable to that which emerged in San Francisco in the

late 1960s.21 America’s underground comics scene – ‘underground’ because
it rejected mainstream publication outlets, self-publishing work without any
commercial strictures – created the conditions for the contemporary
‘graphic novel’, both in the US and elsewhere. Underground comics produc-
tion, as with the underground left-wing press generally, was aided by short-
run web presses that enabled inexpensive printing to flourish. While
sophisticated work, mostly in the traditional European ‘album’ format,
was being published in France, the taboo-breaking of the American under-
ground cartoonists, from Robert Crumb to Spain Rodriguez to Justin Green
and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, was momentous nationally and internation-
ally, redefining comics as an adult medium. Crumb, who had been working
for Hallmark Cards, inaugurated and defined the underground by selling
his comic book ZAP no. 1 – subtitle: ‘for adult intellectuals only’ – on San
Francisco’s Haight Street in February 1968; he and wife, anticipating the
birth of their son Jesse, even at one point stuffed his self-published comic
book in a pram and sold copies to passersby.
Crumb set the stage for a whole new comics culture. Spiegelman, who
was also centrally involved in the underground scene, argues that Crumb
changed comics culture forever by inventing comics with no punch-line. In
other words, while some underground comics work played with genre, the
late 1960s and early 1970s was the time when the medium definitively
divorced itself from genre expectations, particularly expectations that sug-
gested it was geared towards children and (male) adolescents. And Crumb
channelled a profound and deep-seated disgust and malaise provoked by
contemporary America that translated on the sketchbook page as teeming
psychedelic landscapes that were both amusing and horrifying. The
response to Crumb’s work in his self-published ZAP was enormous and
immediate; and Crumb’s description of creating this work solidifies the idea
he was somehow irrigating a sentiment below the surface from within
himself that also belonged collectively to his generation – disquietude,
anger, disbelief – and giving it body in the form of comics.
One might regard the underground as the culmination of the earlier
comics histories and antecedents sketched here; the space where a concern
for populism and reaching a common audience met with the political force
of disinhibition; a sharp awareness of the power of visualising the sup-
pressed and unspoken; and a rigorous experimentation with form, particu-
larly in how a comics narrative approaches temporality and spatiality. The
latter attribute can be seen in its most developed form in Spiegelman’s 1978
collection Breakdowns, which is heavily engaged with modernist visual and
literary aesthetics. But it was the American underground that was also
185
responsible for innovating serious comics autobiography and non-fiction,

the cornerstone of what has become the ‘graphic novel’ canon. Justin
Green’s 1972 Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, a 41-page
story about obsessive-compulsive disorder, adolescent sexuality, and
Catholic guilt, published by Last Gasp Press (and republished in 2009 by
McSweeney’s), is heralded as the first autobiographical narrative in comics,
and Spiegelman, whose Maus almost singlehandedly brought a mainstream
respectability to comics, states often that he owes part of his Pulitzer Prize
to Green for this pioneering confessional work. The first ‘graphic novel’,
one might argue, is actually Green’s underground comic book, since
the tone, content, honesty and introspection he established became so
crucial to establishing contemporary graphic narrative. In the underground,
too, women cartoonists, who in previous eras of comics history had
numbered few among the ranks of comics creators, claimed a place,
producing significant original comics and working, often collectively, on
comics titles such as Tits & Clits and Twisted Sisters. Aline Kominsky-
Crumb, whose 1972 story ‘Goldie: A Neurotic Woman’ in the first issue
of Wimmen’s Comix, closely followed Justin Green’s inaugural autobio-
graphical piece, was the first woman creating comics autobiography. Both she
and Justin Green were refugees from art school and abstract expressionism
when they arrived in San Francisco, the scene’s epicentre, in 1971.
The early 1970s are key years in American comics non-fiction –
Spiegelman published his three-page ‘Maus’ story, a prototype for his
longer, groundbreaking work of the same name, in an underground publi-
cation in 1972 – and so, too, in Japanese comics non-fiction. The term
manga refers to comics from Japan; it translates roughly as ‘nonsensical
pictures’. If Spiegelman broke new ground in the US by approaching his
parents’ experience in the Second World War in comics form, in that same
year Keiji Nakazawa, a Japanese cartoonist who had lived in Hiroshima
and survived the bombing of his city also detailed the impact of the Second
World War on his life and family in comics form. ‘I Saw It: The Atomic
Bombing of Hiroshima’, was first published as a 48-page comics narrative
in the Japanese magazine Monthly Shonen Jump, its title evoking Goya’s
famous ‘Disasters of War’ series (1810–20), which pictured the French
invasion of Spain, and carried captions such as, simply, ‘This I Saw’, and
‘That Is How It Happened’. Indeed, Goya’s use of handmade images as a
form of reporting has been important to contemporary cartoonists as a
model of visual witnessing, a phenomenon that has broken through national
boundaries. ‘I Saw It’ (Ore wa Mita) later developed into the globally
important series Barefoot Gen, which was translated, by Japanese peace
activists, into several English volumes.
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Japan’s comics culture grew enormously after the Second World War,
when Western comics were imported in large number, and strong narrative
structures for comics developed in children’s comics publications, which
then claimed adult audiences, shifting the field dramatically. However,
Japan’s comics culture developed from culturally specific antecedents that
shaped its tradition, such as early, often religious, picture scrolls from the
twelfth century and secular woodblock prints from the seventeenth century
and beyond, which were intended for a popular audience.
While the Japanese manga tradition and the US–European comics tra-
dition have developed independently, we can see that, globally, these spaces
of the popular were expanded, and really re-invented in the early 1970s to
address the disturbing legacies of the past. In the case of Spiegelman and
Nakazawa, the shattering effect of the Second World War, which each of
them approached from a different cultural starting point, led to a new phase
in the creation of comics non-fiction. While in earlier decades the subject of
the war was largely still shrouded in silence or taboo, by the opening of the
1970s – especially after the artistic, cultural and political upheavals of the
1960s – the issues that had been simmering under the surface demanded
representation, in an art form that could defamiliarise received images of
history and yet had the power to make them widely accessible.
Although Spiegelman and Nakazawa worked concurrently, and one
could not claim that manga has been too much influenced by American
and European comics cultures, the trajectory and success of Spiegelman’s
Maus globally reveals comics’ roots in both popular and esoteric spaces:
its ability to command a range of audiences.22 Born in 1948 to Polish
Auschwitz-survivor parents, Spiegelman was an integral part of San
Francisco’s underground comics scene; he edited the comic-book titles
Short Order Comix and Arcade: The Comics Revue, having started his
own magazine, Blasé, as a teenager, which he published himself in editions
of about fifty with a hectograph. Spiegelman’s aforementioned three-page
‘Maus’ appeared in an underground title called Funny Aminals, edited by
Justin Green. In 1980, Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, started
the magazine RAW, which they initially printed themselves in their SoHo
loft. Crucially, one of the goals of RAW was to publish international artists
not widely known in the US: hence the appearance of Jacques Loustal and
Jacques Tardi (France), Lorenzo Mattotti (Italy), Ever Meulen (Belgium),
José Munoz (Argentina), Chéri Samba (the Congo), Joost Swarte (the
Netherlands) and Yoshiharu Tsuge (Japan), among others, as well as now-
influential American cartoonists whose early work RAW promoted, such as
Charles Burns, Gary Panter and Chris Ware. Heavy Metal: The Illustrated
Fantasy Magazine, a title with high production values which drew its
187
inspiration from the French magazine Métal Hurlant, was the other major
venue for international work, yet, as its title indicates, it was far more
explicitly genre-oriented than RAW, choosing to focus on fantasy, in add-
ition to ‘adult’ content.
The meticulously designed, lavishly produced, and rigorously edited
RAW, intended to showcase the sophistication of contemporary ‘comix
and graphix’, was a huge success by Mouly and Spiegelman’s standards: it
sold out of its print runs, and quickly gained a prestigious reputation among
cartoonists and avant-garde art aficionados. RAW marketed itself as avant-
garde, while Weirdo, a comics title started by Robert Crumb, has been seen
as a counterpoint, less interested in intellectualism than in continuing the
populist, newsprint-quality underground culture that by the early ’80s had
begun petering out. But when RAW began, its founders considered a 5,000-
copy print run huge. Spiegelman and Mouly hand-glued collage pieces in
every copy of their no. 7 issue (May 1985) subtitled ‘The Torn-Again
Graphix magazine’. Their idea was of a magazine that would reach a
wide audience – and this was definitely their intention – yet flirted with
the one-of-a-kind production and detailing that is also the realm of artists’
books and other fine-art formats. Spiegelman published one chapter of his
work-in-progress, Maus, which he simply conceived of as ‘comics that
would need a bookmark’, in every issue of RAW (starting with no. 2) as a
stapled-in booklet. He assumed when the work was finished that his and
Mouly’s own RAW publishing company would issue it as a book, and he
saved sketches from his work on Maus to include with each copy of that
press run.
The instalments of Maus, which portrayed Germans as cats, Jews as mice
and Polish gentiles as pigs in order to tell the story of Spiegelman’s father’s
survival in Auschwitz – as well as the cartoonist son’s struggle to make a
book about his father’s history – gained immediate attention, and Pantheon
issued the books (Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History
appeared in 1986; Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
appeared in 1991) to enormous acclaim. The two volumes of Maus repre-
sented thirteen years of work for Spiegelman, and they changed the land-
scape for comics forever. Maus broke into spaces that were previously
unavailable to comics narratives: it was nominated for a National Book
Critics Circle Award in Biography, alongside prose texts (a biography of
Langston Hughes won); it appeared on the Times bestseller list; it won a
Pulitzer Prize; it was the subject of a museum show at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York City. It also made its way onto syllabi at all levels
of education, from grade school to graduate school, though Spiegelman had
initially turned down a Young Adult award given to Maus. Maus was a
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bestseller, but it was also a hit among critics and intellectuals and, with its
roots in the underground and practices of self-publishing, Maus’s appear-
ance as a mainstream-published and marketed book brought together the
mutually inflected registers of the popular and the deadly serious.
Spiegelman proved with Maus that comics is a form and not a genre, and
he put pressure on taxonomies operating both within the academy and
within literary journalism, so that the book was moved from the fiction to
the non-fiction side of the Times bestseller list after Spiegelman complained.
Maus has become one of the most widely discussed contemporary texts
dealing with the Holocaust, especially in relation to the ethics of testimony,
the question of witnessing, and the self-reflexivity that Spiegelman threads
throughout his book that show an awareness of the limits of representation.
There are a million copies of Maus in print in the US alone and it has been
translated into upwards of thirty-five languages.
The 1990s saw important non-genre work follow in Maus’s wake, such as
the comics (known as BD or bandes dessinées) coming out of the independ-
ent French publishing collective L’Association, or, in the US, Howard
Cruse’s loosely autobiographical Stuck Rubber Baby (1995) and Chris
Ware’s sad, beautiful and dense Jimmy Corrigan, initially available in serial
form in Ware’s own Acme Novelty Library. When Jimmy Corrigan
appeared in book form in 2000, it won, although not uncontroversially,
the prestigious Guardian First Book Award in the UK, competing against
acclaimed prose works. While Maus has never receded far from public
consciousness, graphic narratives did not immediately earn the broad atten-
tion that Spiegelman’s book created for them, despite successes like Ware’s,
until a few years into the twenty-first century, when two cartoonists,
Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel, published non-fiction works that
gripped all sorts of audiences in the way Maus had – men and women,
comics lovers and non-comics lovers, mass-market and elite readerships
alike. Both Satrapi, who is Iranian and lives in Paris, and Bechdel, who is
American, claim Maus among their influences; in Satrapi’s case, it was the
book that allowed her to see she could write and draw about war in comics
form. Fascinatingly, Satrapi read Russian-produced comics about commun-
ism as a child in Tehran (a comic-book version of Dialectical Materialism);
however, it was not until she was an adult living in Paris that Maus alerted
her to the form of comics as apposite to her own story of living through the
Iran–Iraq war and the Islamic Revolution.
‘Graphic novel’ has become a common label: it has come to indicate
something along the lines of ‘serious’ or ‘literary’ book-length comics. But
while the appellation ‘graphic novel’ applies to work such as Jimmy Corrigan,
or Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s 1999 From Hell (despite its huge
189
wealth of historical research), or Rutu Modan’s 2007 Exit Wounds, many, if

not most, of the book-length narratives that have gripped the public imagin-
ation and re-focused broad attention on comics in this century are works of
non-fiction. And though it’s notable that conventional comic book enter-
tainment sought to engage with serious subject matter from early on, those
historical narratives were, of course, completely fictional, as in the 1968
Sergeant Fury title ‘Triumph at Treblinka!’ So ‘graphic novel’ is actually a
misnomer when it comes to books such as Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of
a Childhood (2003) or Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006).
These works demand a broader designation: graphic narrative. Moreover,
many cartoonists, Satrapi and Spiegelman among them, actively dislike the
respectability-striving term ‘graphic novel’ – a term that has been activated
mostly by publishers and marketers, not by cartoonists themselves. The
term ‘graphic narrative’ also highlights one of the most interesting ques-
tions that these texts raise by virtue of their form. For comics gives a whole
new cast to what we consider fiction and non-fiction, forcing us to confront
the assumption that drawing as a system is inherently more fictional than
written prose. Thus when the Maus series won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992,
the committee awarded it a ‘special’ Pulitzer Prize, because it was not clear
into which category a comics work about the Holocaust might fall.
Persepolis has earned the most international attention and critical
acclaim of any graphic narrative in the past ten years. Its impact has even
extended to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where it was
made required reading for freshmen. Satrapi routinely contributes Op-Ed
pieces in comics format for the Times, and has weighed in on issues like the
debate on banning the veil in France for newspapers like the Guardian. In
2007, the film version – a black-and-white animated feature co-directed by
Satrapi – won the Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival. While the book has
already been translated into over twenty-five languages, for political
reasons it has yet to be translated into Fārsi or published in Iran – although
Satrapi discovered that there is a Persian version, which she has not seen or
authorised, circulating on the black market there. Satrapi has since pub-
lished Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004), and the non-fiction titles
Embroideries (2005) and Chicken with Plums (2006), which all take place
in Iran.
In Persepolis – and also in Bechdel’s Fun Home – the narrative presents
the procedure, in addition to the object, of memory, through its compo-
sition, through its layers of verbal and visual narration. Satrapi shows us the
state of being of memory by triangulating between the different visual and
verbal versions of herself represented on the page. And while one way in
which Satrapi displays memory is through the spatialising form of comics,
190
which visualises and enmeshes an overlap of selves, another distinctive

aspect of her work lies in her style. Satrapi’s drawing is monochromatic;
she uses flat black and white with no evident shading technique. There is a
starkness, and a spareness, to her images. She also often rejects ‘correct’
perspective. Satrapi’s visual technique in Persepolis specifically references
ancient Persian miniatures, murals and friezes, and she locates her style
along a continuum of Persian art. But her overall visual syntax must also be
understood as consonant with an avant-garde tradition, in that the minim-
alist play of black and white is part of her stated aim of presenting events
with a pointed degree of abstraction in order to call attention to the horror
of history. One of the most forceful aspects of Persepolis, then, is that its
visual style reflects the viewpoint of a child. Persepolis is, after all, as its
subtitle suggests, the ‘story of a childhood’, and yet it is a book about
imagining and witnessing violence: the narrative’s force comes from the
disjuncture between the often gorgeous minimalism of Satrapi’s drawings,
and the complicated traumatic events they depict, including harassment,
torture, execution, bombings and mass murder.
One example from Persepolis that demonstrates both the power of
Satrapi’s style and also the effect of comics’ gutter for envisioning such
circumstances is the last page of the chapter entitled ‘The Key’. Here the
protagonist Marji, aged twelve, learns that boys approximately her own
age, but from different class backgrounds, are being offered the enticement
of gold-painted plastic keys, billed as ‘keys to paradise’, should they die in
battle in the war with Iraq. In the chapter’s conclusion, Satrapi draws only
two, twinned panels. Each spans the width of the page. At the top, a large
frame – one of the largest in the book – depicts the bodies of young men
flying through the air, propelled upwards by an explosion, with keys dan-
gling conspicuously around their necks. Their bodies appear as flat, all-
black silhouettes, tossed in shaded flame. This detailed shading, which is
unusual in Persepolis, shows how in comics the shifting of visual style can
communicate urgency and even crisis. Below, across the gutter, in a smaller
frame that has an all-white background – the simplicity here more typical of
Persepolis’s approach – Marji and five friends attend a party. The cluster of
friends, in the left-hand side of the frame, is dancing, leaping around; like
the soldiers above, not one of their bodies is touching the ground. Their
features are distinct and they are all smiling. Marji occupies the right-hand
side of the frame in close-up, arms akimbo in dance, a huge grin on her face,
looking directly at the reader. The slim text box at the top of the image lets
us know, ‘I got to go to my first party. Not only did my mom let me go, she
also knitted me a sweater full of holes and made me a necklace with chains
and nails. Punk rock was in.’23 Marji’s body contrasts – back over the space
191
of the gutter – with an anonymous form, the all-black body of a boy who
occupies the right-hand foreground of the page’s first panel, directly above
her, also facing outwards towards the reader. The composition of the page
suggests readers make the connection between one moment – the imagined
violent blast of minefields – and another moment, in a different time and
place, in which kids attend a party that glamorises and aestheticises vio-
lence, across the gutter. Here we can see how comics doesn’t always deliver
an obvious sequence of framed moments, but rather provokes readers to
make the links themselves in and through the spaces the page sets up.
Bechdel’s Fun Home is also about childhood and trauma, but functions
very differently from Persepolis, although each demonstrates the efficacy of
comics for expressing certain kinds of stories – stories about memory, about
trauma, about loss, about visual witnessing. When Fun Home appeared in
the summer of 2006, it met with enormous interest and critical acclaim. Fun
Home received accolades in upmarket publications like the New York
Times, where it made the bestseller list, but it was also voted one of the
mainstream People magazine’s top ten books of 2006. It was deemed the
number-one non-fiction book of the year by Entertainment Weekly, and
Time magazine’s best book of the year, in any category. That a comics text
about a butch lesbian growing up in rural Pennsylvania can win such
awards is a striking barometer of the extent to which graphic narratives
are becoming accepted by mainstream audiences. Already, Fun Home has
been translated into over ten languages, including Hungarian, Finnish,
Korean and, recently, Chinese where a private publisher called Beijing Zito
co-published the book with Shaanxi Normal Universal Press, an official
government publisher that censored the book’s nudity.
Fun Home is about Bechdel’s closeted gay father, who stepped in front
of a Sunbeam Bread truck on the Pennsylvania highway when she was
nineteen, just a few months after she came out to her family as a lesbian.
Bruce Bechdel was a high-school English teacher, obsessive restorer of the
family’s Victorian Gothic Revival home, and a part-time undertaker. The
title ‘Fun Home’, then, refers to Bruce Bechdel’s workspace and is short for
‘funeral home’. Fun Home has a very dense narrative fabric, both visually
and verbally. One of the reasons that Fun Home may have been so quickly
accepted as serious literature is that it explicitly identifies itself as ‘literary’:
it reflects on, and cites, many famous, mostly modernist, works of litera-
ture. Bechdel unfolds her story about her family through the lens of the
literature that her father most loved. The book engages most significantly
with Joyce, in its first and last chapters, but Fun Home also adopts works
by Camus, Fitzgerald, James, Stevens, Proust, Wilde and Colette, among
others, as filters through which to frame its meditations and its central
192
events. It is a captivating narrative conceit, in part because it appears,

at least on the surface, to cede to the kind of emotional distance that
Bechdel critiques in her own family. Further, the diverse references and
literary modalities upon which the book is built, from The Odyssey and
high modernism to children’s books and gay activist writing of the 1970s, is
emblematic of how today’s comic books and graphic narratives freely mix
different modes and discursive registers.
Documents from the Bechdel family archive are meticulously represented
throughout Fun Home; in addition to photographs, Bechdel draws police
reports, typed letters, handwritten letters, dictionary entries, diary entries,
book pages, old notes and cartoons. The book employs two different
representational styles: while crisp black line art with a grey-green ink wash
predominates, it features a more heavily cross-hatched black and white for
photographs. In drawing, and in some cases re-drawing, all of the archival
material on which her book is based, for the pages of her memoir, Bechdel
proposes the power of comics’ hand as a link between the past and the
present. She retranslates an extant archive in her own handwriting as a way
of establishing a sort of bodily intimacy with her dead father, and also as a
distancing device, a sense of remove. The complexity of her position
towards her father is made thematic and, significantly, literal through
comics form.
There are many reasons comics is such an apt form for serious non-
fiction. There is the iconic nature of the traumatic image – the fact that
the intensity of trauma produces fragmented, imagistic memories. One can
argue that trauma itself breaks the boundaries of form, and perhaps can be,
at least in part, communicated viscerally and emotionally through the
visual. And comics may be particularly suited to express traumatic histories
because its basic narrative form works with a counterpoint between pres-
ence and absence, from frame to gutter to frame to gutter. Yet while both
Satrapi and Bechdel demonstrate the efficacy of comics, each registers a
separate kind of concern with the project of representation. The minimalist,
two-tone, simplified schema of Persepolis at once aims to be productively
alienating – working against the types of images of Iran in today’s media –
and also, in its accessible syntax, its visual ease, and its de-particularised
faces, it suggests the horrifying normality of violence in Iran. Fun Home
works in reverse: by focusing on the most particular aspects of the Bechdel
family, recuperating an archive of documents, it aims to show us, broadly,
the process of interpretation as a process of visualisation and embodiment.
The commercial, genre-based comic-book industry, that is to say, the
industry based on superheroes, in their contemporary manifest forms, is
still going strong, and in fact, the two biggest American companies, Marvel
193
and DC, have expanded their formats. For example, DC now publishes
non-superhero graphic narratives through its Vertigo imprint. But the
biggest development in recent comics history is non-fiction, non-genre
work – a path trail-blazed by Maus, and works like Barefoot Gen – and,
particularly, the global circulation of narratives mapping both individual
lives and world-historical events. The 2007 show ‘Africa Comics’ at the
Studio Museum in Harlem, which showcased thirty-two artists (and
offered translation sheets for each work), is indicative of how awareness
of global comics culture is broadening. For there are countless examples of
important comics circulating from locations all over the world, including
the Malta-born, US resident Joe Sacco’s comics journalism, which is breath-
taking in its complexity and detail: Sacco’s four books report on the Balkans
and the Middle East, and his new title is on Gaza. Coco Wang, a Chinese
cartoonist, posted twelve ‘earthquake strips’ on her blog in May 2008.
While her strips obviously lack a concern with the book as object, there is
an urgency to Wang’s witnessing of China’s devastating earthquake: anec-
dotes, sensibilities, images seared into the brain. That these strips circulated
so quickly and widely is not only a testament to the internet but also to the
undimmed power of the hand-drawn image, reminding us how comics, a
mass-market form, has always been shaped by productive contradictions.
NOTES
1 See Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York:
HarperCollins, 1993), p. 9.
2 For scholars supporting this usage, see Hillary Chute, ‘Comics as Literature?
Reading Graphic Narrative’, PMLA 123:2 (March 2008): 452–65; McCloud,
Understanding Comics; Robin Varnum and Christina Gibbons (eds.), The
Language of Comics: Word and Image (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2001).
3 For more on ‘abstract comics’ see Andrei Molotiu (ed.), Abstract Comics (Seattle:
Fantagraphics, 2009).
4 See David Kunzle (ed.), Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2007).
5 McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 17.
6 Adam Gopnik and Kirk Varnedoe, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular
Culture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990), p. 153.
7 George Perry and Alan Aldridge, The Penguin Book of Comics (London: The
Penguin Press, 1971), p. 17.
8 Hillary Chute, ‘Art Spiegelman, Part 1’, Print (December 2008). Online. www/
printmag.com/Article/Art_Spiegelman_interview_part1. Spiegelman sees that the
idea of comics as a narrative series of pictures goes from medieval woodcuts – as
well as ‘the stained glass windows that are recapitulated in those woodcuts’ – into
something ‘recognizably like comics’ with Hogarth’s engravings.
194
9 On the history of the speech balloon, see Thierry Smolderen’s ‘Of Labels, Loops,
and Bubbles’, Comic Art 8 (Summer 2006).
10 M. Thomas Inge, ‘Comic Strips’, Handbook of American Popular Culture,
second edition, revised and enlarged: Advertising-Graffiti (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1989), p. 207.
11 Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), p. 14.
12 Perry and Aldridge, The Penguin Book of Comics, p. 95.
13 John Tebbel, The Life and Good Times of William Randolph Hearst (New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1952), pp. 120–1. Tebbel reports that the name ‘the Yellow Kid’
was also applied to Hearst himself.
14 McCay drew Little Nemo for Bennett’s New York Herald from 1905 to 1911,
and then drew the strip under the title Land of Wonderful Dreams for Hearst’s
New York American from 1911 to 1913. The Little Nemo strip was briefly
revived at the New York Herald from 1924 to 1926, after which time McCay
rejoined Hearst papers drawing editorial illustrations.
15 These statistics are from Michael Barrier and Martin Williams (eds.),
A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics (New York: Smithsonian Insti-
tution Press and Harry N. Abrams, 1981), pp. 10–11.
16 This statistic is from Bradford W. Wright’s excellent, informative Comic Book
Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001).
17 Ibid., p. 6.
18 The term ‘woodcut novels’ also includes wood engravings, linocuts and leadcuts.
See David Beronä, Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (New York:
Abrams, 2008), p. 10.
19 ‘It is such a popular work that it is quite natural and fitting for a publisher to
want to take it out of the realm of the esoteric and make it available to the
worker, the taxi driver, and the young telephone operator. It belongs much more
to the common people than to the snobs; and I am happy to do my part in
making it better known to the democratic-minded public.’ Thomas Mann,
‘Introduction’, trans. Joseph M. Bernstein, in Frans Masereel, Passionate Journey:
A Novel Told in 165 Woodcuts (New York: Penguin, 1988), unpaged. As in the US
context of comics, in Germany the graphic narrative has roots in a political and
populist framework.
20 Paul Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular
Culture (London: Verso, 2004), p. 195.
21 As Roger Sabin points out in Adult Comics (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 37,
while British counter-culture ‘quickly generated a thriving alternative press, with
newspapers and magazines like IT (International Times) and Oz’ that used
graphics to a greater extent than the mainstream press, there was ‘no attempt
initially to produce [comics] for adults. Instead, the first comix came from
America.’
22 See Frederik L. Schodt, Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics
(New York: Kodansha International, 1983).
23 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, trans. Blake Ferris and
Mattias Ripa (New York: Pantheon, 2003), p. 102.
195
11
B R E N D A R . S I LV E R
Popular fiction in the digital age
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
Appearing on his computer screen at work one night, these words, the
opening lines of the text adventure game Adventure, fill Jackdaw Acquerelli
‘with a great sense of well-being. Happiness flowed in its own small stream
out of [his] chest and down into his typing digits.’ A computer programmer
in Richard Powers’s novel Plowing the Dark, Jackdaw is not the only person
to have had this response. Adventure, created originally by Will Crowther
around 1975 and modified by Don Woods in 1976, invited a whole gener-
ation to enter the digitally created world of caves, mazes, puzzles, story,
gameplay and participatory culture that has indelibly altered our under-
standing of popular fiction. When the young Jackdaw first discovered the
game he perceived it as a world of ‘pure potential’.1 Today, the world of
digital popular fiction built on that potential is vast and constantly
changing, a world without clear origins, definitions, or borders, with so
many paths to follow, so many disparate artefacts and practices to collect
and describe, that even the most intrepid critical explorer could easily get
lost. In many ways there does not yet exist a defined field that would
contain a ‘digital’ version of popular fiction; both the artefacts, or new
fictional forms, and the critical tools defy traditional categories, crossing
media and disciplines. This essay focuses on three of these artefacts – the
fictional form called, variously, text adventure game, storygame, and Inter-
active Fiction; the Family Albums created by players of The Sims; and
internet fan fiction – to illustrate the intersections of digital technologies
with popular fiction and popular culture that are redrawing the critical and
cultural map.
The first thing the explorer notes is the lack of an agreed set of rules or
definitions when it comes to what makes the new digital artefacts distinct
196
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from older forms such as novels, films, dramatic performances and non-
digital games. For most of us, interactive is the term that probably comes to
mind, and, while all commentators in the field evoke the term, many argue
that it is ‘too broad to be truly useful’ without identifying the specific
contexts and processes in which it operates. One thing that makes interactiv-
ity problematic is the centrality of the computer to digital art and media. New
media critic Lev Manovich, for example, has argued that ‘in relation to
computer-based media, the concept of interactivity is a tautology’: ‘modern
HCI [Human Computer Interaction] is by definition interactive’, allowing
‘the user to control the computer in real-time by manipulating information
displayed on the screen’. For designer Noah Wardrip-Fruin, however, the
very fact that the ‘digital media processes’ made possible by the computer
‘don’t operate on their own’ opens up the space for new forms of fiction with
‘new models of character, story, and language’.2
When we turn to these new forms of fiction, we confront a question that
permeated the early discussions of the new media: the ontological question
of what, exactly, they are; here, the lack of clear borders comes to the fore.
This question, and the multiplicity of approaches brought to answering it, is
evident in one of the first books to attempt a comprehensive survey:
Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan’s First Person: New Media as Story,
Performance, and Game. Structured as a series of statements and responses,
this collection documents an often heated conversation among critics with
widely divergent views.3 At one extreme are the theorists who want a clear
distinction between new media and old media, worried, in part, that the
new forms and the study of them will be appropriated by the established
disciplines of literary, film, theatre, or media studies, an attitude that was
particularly strong among those involved in creating the new field of game
studies. At the opposite pole are those who argue that the distinction
between old and new media matters less than what characterises the new
art forms themselves. A third response introduces the concept of
remediation into the debate, described as ‘the cycling of different media
through one another’, an ongoing process within media history that works
at the level of both content and form. In the digital age, remediation comes
from all sides. For Manovich, the history of the human–computer interface,
what we see on the screen and how we interact with it, is one of reformat-
ting ‘the printed page, film, television’. Others point to the prevalence of
contemporary, post-computer works of print literature and film that
remediate digital structures and forms: Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House
of Leaves, which can be read as a remediation of not only digital narratives
such as hypertext novels but of photography and film; or Tom Twyker’s
game-like film Run Lola Run.4
197
brenda r. silver
No aspect of the border wars has been more contested than the role of
narrative or story in computer games. The young Jackdaw in Plowing the
Dark might have experienced the game as being ‘inside a book’, ‘inside a
story’, but numerous game theorists, particularly in the early debates about
the nature of games, have vehemently disagreed.5 For them, understanding
computer games as stories or narrative in the usual literary sense, often
subsumed into the critical methodology known as narratology, was to miss
the point of what they actually were: games that one played, an activity in
which the gameplay becomes the defining quality. Here the relevant meth-
odology is ludology, a term derived from ludus, the Latin word for game,
and introduced by Gonzalo Frasca to signify ‘the study of games’ as such;
this practice involves paying attention to ‘what makes games games, such as
rules, goals, player activity, the projection of the player’s actions into the
game world, the way the game defines the possible actions of the player’.
But ludology can also signify ‘the study of games as distinct from narra-
tives’, the prevailing definition during the ludology–narratology wars when
ludologists, at their most extreme, argued that games and narratives were
mutually exclusive.6
Happily, these wars have become less intense as the study of games has
become established as a discipline in its own right. Critics have begun to ask
not ‘Are games narratives?’ but ‘How are games narrative?’ Using Doom to
illustrate the multiple ways that players experience narrative, Katie Salen
and Eric Zimmerman point to the ‘“backstory” that we read on the back of
the game box’, the ‘opening screen title and between-level story updates’,
the gameplay itself, including the ‘navigation of space via POV [point of
view] and top-down maps’, and ‘the qualities and attributes of the game’s
characters, setting, and plot’. Narratives, they argue, are structured into
games in two different, albeit usually interconnected ways, both of which
‘place narrative within the context of interactivity’. The first type, embed-
ded narrative, tends to be more linear, more like fiction or film; its elements
are ‘fixed and predetermined units of narrative content’, and the player
experiences it as ‘a crafted story interactively told’. It dominates in games
where you have to perform predetermined actions to win. In the second
type, players ‘engage with narrative as an emergent experience that happens
while the game is played’, dependent on the player’s own choices. Still
another form of narrative consists of the ‘retelling’ of stories that get told
after the game is complete.7
A further example of the indeterminate borders linking or separating
digital artefacts from other forms of popular fiction arises from the ques-
tion of genre, which generates multiple intersections when it comes to both
games and fan fiction. For games, the question is whether to categorise
198
them in terms of the genres already familiar to us from popular culture

such as science fiction, horror, mystery, adventure, and fantasy; or to
privilege genre categories that are more specific to the ways in which the
games are played, such as first-person shooter or role-playing or rhythm
and dance; or to acknowledge both, redefining genre criteria along new
lines. From one perspective, critics argue, it is shared genres that tie games
to other forms of popular fiction, noting for example that when players
enter a game defined as horror or mystery, they know what to anticipate
and hence how to respond if they want to win.8 But from a different
perspective, critics also point out, games that share narrative content and
visual iconography associated with popular genres such as horror or
science fiction do not necessarily present the player with similar game
worlds; nor do they call for the same kinds of interactions with this world.
Space Invaders, Spaceward Ho!, Defender and Star Wars might all be
considered science fiction, but the player’s experiences will be very differ-
ent. These perceptions led Mark Wolf to look beyond the classifications
familiar to us from film and literature to the interactivity that constitutes
‘an essential part of every game’s structure’. The result is a detailed
categorisation of forty-two genres ranging from Abstract, Adaptation
and Adventure to Training Simulation and Utility, which, Wolf argues,
can be used in conjunction with the established taxonomies and can be
further expanded into subgenres.9
Wolf’s willingness to acknowledge multiple ways to define his topic
signals a broader shift from the ontological question of what the new
artefacts are to a recognition of the multiple tools, or methodologies, that
help us to read them, both on their own terms and as part of a broader
popular culture. Viewed from the latter perspective, both games and fan
fiction have been read as exemplifying what is often called participatory
culture, characterised in part by works that creatively transform their source
into something new, in part by collaborative authorship, and in part by a
shift in the power relations among producers and consumers, including
fans. The latter characteristic leads Henry Jenkins to argue that the partici-
patory culture brought about by digital technologies is better defined as
convergence culture, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, the
power of the media producer and media consumer interact in unpredictable
ways, and the internet provides a ‘powerful new distribution channel’ for
amateur or vernacular cultural productions that are changing our under-
standing of what folk or popular culture means today.10 The cumulative
effect of these works and the theories and methodologies used to study
them, I would add, are also changing our understanding of how the new
digital artefacts can be understood as art.
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Adventure
In a 2009 interview about interactive fiction (IF), writer Jimmy Maher
declared that Adventure was ‘easily one of the ten or even five most
important’ computer games ‘EVER’. Asked whether IF would have been
inevitable without Adventure, he responded:
I’d say that the real wild-card here is not Adventure but rather Adventure’s
inspiration, Dungeons and Dragons. You just can’t exaggerate the importance
of D&D to all of the many storygames that have followed it. It really did
revolutionize the way we look at stories and games and the combination of the
two in a way totally out of proportion to the people who have ever actually
played it. But then, we could make exactly the same statement about Adven-
ture . . . Every story-oriented computer game today, including graphical adven-
tures, can trace its roots straight back to Adventure.11
Maher is not alone in identifying Adventure as a beginning; it is also read as

a precursor of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons or Domains), which translated
the collaborative Dungeons and Dragons-type role-playing board games
into the digital realm; these in turn generated the MMORPGs (Massively
Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) – Ultima, Everquest, World of
Warcraft, etc. – that are so popular today. The story of Adventure, then, is
an origins story, one whose own origins bring together the early days of
what became the internet, the collaborative hacker sensibility, previous
forms of computer-generated interactive narrative, and the transition of
popular literary genres into the digital world. In its juxtaposition of hetero-
geneous media and tools and its multiple authorship, it illustrates graphic-
ally why digital literary artefacts are so difficult to define and pin down. As
Espen Aarseth observes, despite being indebted to Dungeons and Dragons,
Adventure ‘transcended the cultural position of a singular text and became a
mythological urtext, located everywhere and nowhere’.12
From one perspective the story of Adventure begins with Will Crowther, a
programmer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts company heavily involved in the development of ARPANET, the
precursor of the internet, and an avid caving enthusiast. In 1972 he and his
wife Pat, also a caver, used the large mainframe at BBN to produce digital
maps of the Mammoth-Flint Ridge Cave System in Kentucky. Around 1975
Crowther designed a computer game for his young daughters, a game in
which the player, ‘you’, would have to make your way through a series of
caves, exploring the different rooms, hunting for treasure, solving puzzles in
order to progress. The descriptions of the rooms, based on the actual
geography and geology of what is known as the Bedquilt Cave or Bedquilt
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Entrance, provide richly detailed narrative settings that are often cited as its
major literary quality. In the original game, there were five treasures: a
snake that blocked your path; a dragon you had to kill with your bare
hands; attacking dwarves and a thieving pirate; and a maze that you
couldn’t get through unless you mapped it.13 Crowther played the game
with his daughters, establishing it as a potentially collaborative activity.
Then, the story goes, Crowther left the game on ARPANET, where it was
discovered in 1976 by Don Woods, a programmer at SAIL, the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Agency in Palo Alto, California. Tracking Crowther
down in order to get the code, Woods also secured his permission to tweak it,
cleaning up bugs and adding, among other things, more magical items,
characters and puzzles, as well as some humour. The humour included
responses to inappropriate commands that could be highly sarcastic, initiating
another recurring element of the genre. As one IF designer explains, ‘Much
of the game’s classic quality comes from the tension between the original
simulation, the earnestly discovered caves with their mysterious etched mark-
ings and spectacular chambers, and the cartoonish additions – the troll bridge,
the giant’s house, the Oriental Room, the active volcano.’ Woods also added
a second maze, increasing the difficulty and making the phrase ‘twisty little
passages’ synonymous with IF itself. This version, made freely available
on ARPANET with the file name ADVENT, became an instant phenom-
enon; today we would say it went viral. Aarseth calls it a ‘productivity
threatening’ programme, and there are stories of whole offices stopping
work until the players had mapped the caves and were able to complete it.14
From a different perspective the origins of the game, ‘a new category of
computer program and of literature’, can be traced back to previous
literary experiments that disrupted or opened up narrative, known variously
as ‘literary machines’ or ‘ludic literary styles’. Examples include the ancient
Chinese work the I Ching, or Book of Changes, which contains 4,096
possible oracular texts, and Raymond Queneau’s 1961 Cent mille milliards
de poèmes (One Hundred Trillion Poems), which consists of ten sonnets
printed on ten separate pages that are then cut into fourteen separate strips
of paper, each one containing a single line of the sonnet, producing ten
possible poems.15 Queneau’s epigraph from Alan Turing, one of the key
figures in the development of both computers and artificial intelligence,
evokes computers talking to computers, but in Adventure a human being
talks to a machine, using natural language, not programming language or
code. With his daughters in mind, Crowther wanted to create a game that
‘would not be intimidating to non-computer people’, designing it ‘so that
the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more
standardized commands’.16 Here, the backstory lies in earlier natural
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language parsers, programmes that can interpret user input and respond to it,
producing the effect of conversation; the most important example is
Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, known as a chatterbot. Eliza’s most famous
incarnation, DOCTOR, which imitated a Rogerian therapist, looked for
specific words or categories of words in the user’s input to generate its
response before falling back on a neutral default script. Weizenbaum
referred to it as a parody, but Nick Montfort calls it the ‘first piece of
interactive software to exhibit literary qualities’.17 Adventure’s parser was
very simple, recognising only a verb and a noun: enter building; go west.
Later interactive fiction parsers were able to read more complex, nuanced,
phrases, enriching the narrative aspects of the form.
As noted above, one can also trace a direct line back from Adventure to
Dungeons and Dragons and from there to Tolkien and the fantasy genre as a
whole. We know from Crowther that he was involved in a Dungeons and
Dragons group at the time he wrote Adventure; we also know that the
dungeon-master in the group, the person who creates the settings and
narrative frameworks that structure the game, emphasised the story-telling
aspects and ‘tried to create a Tolkien-inspired world’ that was ‘consistent
with Middle Earth’.18 By transporting this world into the game, Adventure
anticipates all the cave games that were to follow, reflecting the huge impact
The Lord of the Rings had when the 1965 paperback edition introduced the
novels to future game designers; one has only to think of all the elves,
dwarves and dungeons that still populate game narratives. Yet other literary
connections exist as well. Mary Ann Buckles locates its literary lineage not
only in fantasy, but in other popular literary genres: adventure tales such as
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which, she notes, also started
from a map; the early prose ‘novels’ of chivalry that, capitalising on the new
technology of the printing press, string together independent units and are
infinitely expandable; fantasy and science fiction genres that create imagin-
ary worlds with their own rules; and mystery stories, where the player
becomes the detective or puzzle-solver. All of these genres, she notes,
‘emphasize a step-by-step, action–consequence type of thinking and imagin-
ation’.19 Within this world, YOU become the protagonist, the main charac-
ter, prompting one critic to note the connection not only to role-playing
games where ‘the gamemaster creates the world by directly addressing the
players’, but to dramatic performance in general.20
When the text adventure game went commercial in the late 1970s,
acquiring along the way the designation interactive fiction, it drew upon
all of these genres and more, as well as adapting novels – The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy, to take one extremely popular example – and luring at
least one poet, Robert Pinsky, to create an original work, Mindwheel.
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During its heyday, Infocom, which was started by former graduate students
and professors at MIT and became the largest of the companies selling
games to be played on a home computer, published thirty-five canonical
works that they marketed in terms of popular literary genres: fantasy,
‘detective fiction, science fiction, modern-day treasure-plundering excur-
sions, children’s fiction, the spy thriller, and historical fiction/romance’.21
But when it came to identifying what these new digital artefacts were and
did, they resisted any clear categorisation. In their marketing, Infocom
stressed the ‘storygame’ aspect of the artefact, describing their interactive
fictions as stories but also as a series of puzzles that ‘transform [the] text
from an hour’s worth of reading to many, many hours’ worth of thinking’,
‘stimulating mental exercise’. Designer Graham Nelson is clear about the
role of puzzles in IF: ‘Without puzzles, or problems, or mechanisms to allow
the player to receive the text a little at a time . . . there is no interaction.’
This leads Montfort to introduce another literary antecedent into the mix:
the riddle, IF’s ‘most important early ancestor’ and the most useful in
considering its ‘aesthetics and poetics’. Defined as ‘a short lyric poem that
poses a question, the answer to which lies hidden in hints’, the riddle
demands a solution, involving the riddlee in the process. The riddle is thus
inherently interactive, as is IF: ‘if nothing is typed’ into the computer,
‘nothing happens’; the riddle remains unsolved, and the narrative does not
progress. For Montfort, puzzles and riddles are central to the ‘potential
narrative’ that characterises and distinguishes IF: not narrative per se, but
‘the effect of the narrative in the process of being generated’. The distinc-
tion, he argues, is crucial to understanding what makes the fiction inter-
active and brings us back to the importance of the computer. Starting with a
conventional definition of narrative – ‘the representation of real or fictive
events and situations in a time sequence’ – he notes that ‘this can result from
an interactive session but does not describe any IF work itself’. Instead, any
understanding of interactive, potential narrative would have to take into
account its distinct nature as a ‘text-accepting, text-generating computer
program’; a ‘potential narrative’ or ‘system that produces narrative during
interaction’; a ‘simulation of an environment or world’; and a ‘structure of
rules within which an outcome is sought, also known as a game’.22
‘Also known as a game’: here we return to the ontological question
underlying discussions of all the new digital forms: what, exactly, IF is, a
question that became more important after the mid-1980s when text adven-
ture games, overwhelmed by graphical games, ceased to be produced com-
mercially. (One of the first graphical adventures was Warren Robinett’s
highly popular Adventure for Atari (1978); Robinett had played Crowther
and Woods’s version while a graduate student at Stanford.) By that time,
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though, authoring systems, including the one created by Nelson called

Inform, made it possible for individuals interested in IF to create their
own works. By the 1990s, these writers had found each other in internet
newsgroups such as rec.games.int-fiction and rec.arts.int-fiction. Today,
there is an active, productive, IF community of writers and readers, consti-
tuting one of the richest areas of electronic literature. For many of these
writers, literature is the operative term. Montfort, for example, one of the
central figures in the contemporary IF world, emphasises its position as a
‘new sort of literary art’, while recognising its role as a ‘puzzling and
challenging diversion’. This distinction suggests that the tensions between
art and entertainment, high and popular art/culture, which seem to erupt
whenever new technologies produce new forms such as film and television,
are alive and well in the forms associated with the computer today. When
Montfort comments that not all interactive fictions are text adventures and
explains why interactive fiction is a better term, he worries that ‘the term
text adventure suggests to some people a popular and less literary work,
since adventures have been, in contemporary writing, the domain of popu-
lar fiction’. Nelson sees the situation differently, evoking the appeal of the
early games while acknowledging the more literary qualities of more recent
IF works. The form, he notes, might seem outdated, but for those who
created the early games what stands out is ‘having fun with a new medium
before it became an art form and had serious articles written about it’. The
adventure game, he concludes, was ‘made as well as written: and once made
can never be unmade, so that there will always be a small brick building by
the end of the road’.23
Transformative play: Sims family albums

The productive tension between story and game inherent in Adventure takes
a different form in The Sims, designed by Will Wright to encourage the
player’s creativity, including the telling of stories. Asked about his philos-
ophy of interactive design, Wright, who designed Sim City and other ‘god
games’ before turning to The Sims, evoked his experience of building
dynamic models when young; he wanted, he said, to ‘give the player a tool
so that they can create things’, to provide a world in which the player is the
designer and ‘the little world inside the computer reacts to’ their designs.
This includes the creation of stories, but Wright was clear that games should
not strive to tell stories similar to those found in print, films, or TV, because
the interactive nature of and constraints built into games are not conducive
to traditional storytelling: ‘My aspirations for this new form are not about
telling better stories but about allowing players to “play” better stories
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within these artificial worlds.’24 Within this framework, The Sims Family
Albums, graphic narratives created from screen shots of the gameplay,
illustrate beautifully the complex intersections of traditional storytelling
and the exciting freedom of gaming that characterises this new form.
It is not surprising that The Sims and the Family Albums are at the centre
of a great deal of the discussion about storytelling, interactivity and partici-
pation, particularly when it comes to the emergent narrative that can occur
both within the game and after the fact. Described variously as a digital
dollhouse, a paper doll game, ‘a daily life simulator’ that allows you to
create and manage a houseful of modern-day characters, or ‘a system for
generating stories about suburban life’, the game was designed from the
beginning to facilitate storytelling by the players.25 Storytelling occurs in
several ways. One arises out of the players’ interactions with the characters
they create, the desire to have them enact whatever story it is that the player
has in mind. As Wright notes, this makes the prevailing metaphor for the
game not so much a doll’s house as a theatre or movie set, where the player
becomes the director trying to move the actors around to advance the
story.26 But the way the game is designed, the characters have needs of their
own that often take the story in another direction. This leads one critic to
speculate that we should call it a ‘cyberdrama’, where the actions and hence
the narrative are a collaborative improvisation generated in part by the code
and in part by the player’s actions.27 Wright has commented that when he’s
playing he finds himself using ‘I’ when planning the narrative action (‘I’m to
get a job, then I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do that’), but when the
character rebels and goes off on his or her own, he finds himself switching to
the third person, ‘he’. Another player discovered how integral the ludic
element, the gameplay, is to the narrative experience when she moved from
the single-player version of The Sims, where she found herself telling com-
plex stories, to the multi-player online version, The Sims Online, where
narrative gave way to tasks and idle conversation with the other players.
The difference, she decided, is the godlike perspective in the original game,
which gives her more control over what her characters do and makes for a
more satisfying narrative.28
One of the tools Wright made available from the beginning allowed the
player to capture images on the screen, to take snapshots they could then
put into an album and share with others on Sims’ websites. Instead, what
they did was create graphic fictions, placing the stills side by side and adding
a written narrative and dialogue beneath them. In a sense, this shift from
3-D animation to 2-D graphic fictions concretises Wright’s own repeatedly
stated debt to comics writer Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics.
Talking about the deliberately abstract, low-detail nature of the ‘characters’,
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Wright evokes McCloud’s understanding that individuals will use their

imagination to fill in the ‘representational blanks’, a process they also bring
to filling in the gaps between panels in a comic. In Wright’s terms, ‘people
are very good at simulating in their heads’.29 The translation of the game
into a graphic narrative, though, is no easy task. The autonomy of the Sims
means that you cannot just put them where you need them for your
narrative; it takes work to bring about the right conjunction, and with
multiple characters this can be tricky. But these difficulties do not stop the
players from creating long, often multi-part, narratives that range from
house tours, where players show off their furnishings, to complex narratives
about family life, friendship, romance and abusive relationships. Players
also draw on characters from popular culture to use in their stories.
For Salen and Zimmerman, the Family Album feature provides ‘a won-
derful instance of the player-as-producer paradigm’, a ‘design strategy
linked to the creation of culturally transformative play’ that ‘both reflects
and transforms the game world’; it also illustrates the concept of game as
open culture in which the story and its social and cultural meanings emerge
from the game itself.30 Commentators have read the cultural meanings of
the game and the albums in a variety of ways, but these often start with the
observation that The Sims, which has been a runaway bestseller from the
beginning, was also the first game to attract large numbers of women. This
phenomenon introduces a gender element into the discourse, which is often
tied to the fact that much of the game consists of designing or buying
clothes, furniture, household objects: activities tied to consuming and ‘keep-
ing’ house. Critics disagree whether the game is or is not parodying the
prevalence of consumption (many players play it ironically), but most see a
link between consumption and gender. Mary Flanagan, for example, argues
that the domestic space of The Sims and the emphasis on consumption
feminises the female players, acculturating them into ‘traditional concep-
tions of women’s roles’. But she also argues that players have used the tools
within the game to create new graphics, or skins, that change the domestic
space, as well as using the fan culture outside the game to reimagine and
rewrite household narratives. David Brooks simultaneously disparages and
admires the Family Albums, which he describes as novellas that look like
storyboards, ‘a sort of folk literature that future historians, zeitgeist hunters
and museum curators are going to go for in a big way’, so accurate a
representation are they of contemporary suburban life. They are also,
Brooks argues, a testament to the creativity found among ordinary people.
The stories in the albums may ‘blend into one vast modern cultural land-
scape in which “Oprah” meets “Friends”, “Terms of Endearment” and
MTV’s “Real World”’, but they also inscribe a ‘mass creative process . . .
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like the writing of a joint novel with millions of collaborative and competi-
tive authors’. The narrative about contemporary life that emerges from this
novel, he concludes, is ‘more realistic than most contemporary novels that
get produced by writing workshops’.31
The Family Albums are not the only example of transformative play that
has produced new narrative forms. In their chapter on ‘Games as Open
Culture’, Salen and Zimmerman also include mods, game modifications
that can be as small as changing an avatar’s appearance or as large as
creating new levels or even new games, and, more to our point,
machinima (machine cinema), the computer-generated animated films built
on game engines, where both action and storytelling are part of the mix.
Originating with the first-person shooter game Quake, which allowed
players to record their gameplay in real time, machinima grew from the
players’ realisation that they could use the tool to create films; here, the
characters become actors and text-messages provide the dialogue. As with
the Family Albums, machinima led players to play with an eye towards
capturing the actions that would further the narrative of the film; they also
began to create mods that would give them the characters and settings they
wanted. For Salen and Zimmerman, Quake players ‘not only transformed
the play of the game, but took an open source model and applied it to the
production of new forms of culture. Part theatre, part film, part computer
game, machinima represents the kind of wild exchanges that result from
thoroughly transformative play . . . The formal structure of the game code
gave shape to a new form of storytelling, born from the culture of the first-
person shooter.’32
Transformative works: fan fiction

Fans, Henry Jenkins states, ‘have always been early adapters of new media
technologies’, and this was certainly true of those women – and most fan-
fiction writers are women – who joined Usenet groups such as rec.arts.
startrek; became early users of the ListServ technologies that allowed them
to communicate through email; and helped create the blog phenomenon,
including the immensely popular LiveJournal. For fan-fiction writers, the
move online provided more than another place to post their stories. The
increased visibility of their work, especially on public blogs, also increased
the number and variety of writers and stories, while the new technologies
increased the tools for exchange and collaboration; the result is a cultural
landscape so complex and multifaceted that entering it as a ‘newbie’ is like
entering a foreign country, complete with its own genres and language.
Situated within this world, fans engage in play that transforms their
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favourite films or TV shows or novels or comics into creative artefacts that

they then distribute over the internet, constructing and participating in a
new ‘vernacular culture’. Popular fiction is alive and well in this digital
realm of Transformative Works and Culture, the title of the major online
journal devoted to the field; and, like games, fan fiction is generating its
own art forms that inscribe a tension between rule-based gameplay and
open-ended narratives and culture.33
Defined as ‘fiction based on a situation and characters originally created
by someone else’,34 fan fiction criss-crosses both media and genres; in this
way it shares the heterogeneity and the multiple origins that both character-
ise digital artefacts and make them so hard to pin down. When it comes to
sources, the range is wide and inclusive, as the multiple categories listed on
Fanfiction.net, one of the largest general sites, illustrates. There is also fan
fiction known as RP (real people), devoted to a wide variety of public
figures, past and present. In addition, although contemporary fan fiction
is usually traced back to Star Trek, and many of the subsequent fandoms
grew from other science fiction sources, fan fiction draws upon almost every
popular genre, as well as works considered high or mainstream art. More
significantly, it has created its own genres and subgenres for its artefacts,
with designations so specific that writings about fan fiction often include
glossaries. The overarching genres are gen, general stories; het, signifying a
heterosexual relationship; and slash, signalling a transformative pairing of
two men or two women who are not sexually linked in the source material.
Subgenres include familiar categories such as action/adventure and
romance; other designations indicate that the story is a cross-over with
another series, that it constructs an alternate universe or provides a missing
scene, or that it is PWP, ‘porn without plot’ or ‘plot? what plot?’ One
practitioner noted that people wrote fan fiction ‘because they wanted either
“more of” their source material or “more from it” ’.35 In this sense, like the
creators of Family Albums or machinima, they use their source materials to
create their own narratives.
But these narratives, seemingly so free in their transformative play, are
also, like Family Albums and machinima, constrained by the rules and the
parameters of the pre-existing worlds; as Salen and Zimmerman note, play
always occurs as ‘free movement within a more rigid structure’.36 Take, for
example, the headers that have traditionally preceded online stories and
indicate the genre and subgenre, telling readers what to expect. The term
slash originated with the use in headers of K/S, a shorthand for Star Trek’s
Kirk and Spock, to alert readers to the story’s same-sex content. Headers
might also include a disclaimer that will say, ‘This story is based on charac-
ters and situations created and owned by J. K. Rowling, various publishers
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including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and

Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no
copyright or trademark infringement is intended.’ Evoking the potentially
problematic relationship between writers and publishers or, more likely,
film companies issuing ‘cease and desist’ orders to protect their intellectual
property, the disclaimers also illustrate the shift in the producer/consumer
relationship that Henry Jenkins attributes in part to the rise of the internet
and identifies as part of convergence culture.37 For one thing, the sheer
volume of stories on the internet has made it virtually impossible for the
copyright owners to issue effective ‘cease and desist’ orders, even if they
wanted to; new sites will immediately take the place of those closed down.
Moreover, authors, directors, publishers and TV and film companies have
begun to welcome fan fiction as a way of increasing the visibility and
popularity of their product, often creating a dialogue with the fans in their
texts and online, even as they also try to contain it.
Perhaps the major element of the rules or structure at work in fan fiction
is canon, the ‘events presented in the media source that provide the universe,
setting, and characters’ that writers are expected to know and to get right,
even as they transform them. One of the tasks of betas, the individuals who
read a story before it is posted, is to catch mistakes or discrepancies. But
canon itself is not easy to pin down and is often contested within individual
fandoms, opening up spaces for play. In part, this comes from differences of
interpretation among the writers; but even more it reflects a cultural
environment in which an individual work crosses media, accumulating
multiple versions of the same narrative. As Karen Hellekson and Kristina
Busse point out, for Lord of the Rings ‘the canon may include any combin-
ation of the books (including or excluding Tolkien’s supplementary works
such as The Silmarillion), the animated movie directed by Ralph Bakshi
released in 1978, and the 2001–3 blockbuster Peter Jackson films’. Star
Trek is even more complicated, generally including ‘any of the four TV
series and any the movies, but not the animated TV show or the noveliza-
tions’. Moreover, what constitutes the structure is complicated by what is
known as fanon, the ‘events created by the fan community in a particular
fandom’ that become so accepted that others use them in their own stories,
often leading to the formation of new, shared universes where writers are
encouraged to build on each other’s fictions.38
Operating within this lively online world, fan fiction writers have created
digital artefacts that are not only collaborative but continually evolving,
leading critics to refer to them as works-in-progress.39 As with Crowther
and Wood in the original Adventure and the creators of other open-source
forms, by making the code, in this case their stories, open to others,
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fan fiction writers are creating an interactive, participatory, digital culture.

The sheer numbers attest to the generative nature of this culture and the
pleasures of transformative play it opens to participants. A recent search for
‘fanfiction’ on Google brought up 58,700,000 hits; a search for fanfiction
and ‘fanfic’ on LiveJournal, one of the major venues for fan fiction, suggests
approximately 500 sites devoted to publishing stories.
Afterword: entertainment and art

Unlike the game theorists who initially wanted to distinguish games from
literature or film, fan fiction theorists, who are increasingly fiction writers
as well, have begun to define the form not so much in terms of its own
genres, but as a literary form with clear connections to other forms of
literary production. In making this argument, they point backwards to the
long pre-modern period when writers used the same myths and histories –
the traditional, evolving stories of hero-figures such as King Arthur or
Robin Hood, for example – as well as each others’ telling of them, over
and over again. Others point to the postmodern literary genre that rewrites
earlier literary works, often from a feminist or a postcolonial perspective,
citing as examples Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which retells Jane Eyre
from the point of view of the mad woman in the attic, or Foe, J. M.
Coetzee’s retelling of Robinson Crusoe. The fact that many of these works
‘explicitly mark themselves as revisions, continuations, or insertions’ by
their titles, their characters and their plots aligns them, they argue, with
fan fiction; from this perspective fan fiction ceases to be derivative and
becomes a legitimate, transformative, creative and above all literary
activity.40
The identification of fan fiction as a literary form that shares characteris-
tics with mainstream fiction, like the dual identification of interactive
fiction as both literature and game, signals an evolution in the aspirations
and critical understanding of popular fictions in the digital age from ver-
nacular or folk productions or just entertainment to new forms of art.
The organisers of the 2001 conference on digital games at USC may have
called it ‘Entertainment in the Interactive Age’, but they were clear that
‘Interactive entertainment for all platforms . . . has emerged as the most vital
and pertinent art form of the new century’. The following year Robinett, the
creator of the Atari version of Adventure, argued that while video games
may be at the lowest rank of the ‘artistic food chain’ along with comics, TV
sit-coms and X-rated films, ‘new art forms do come into existence’ and
video games, with their progression from experiments with a new technol-
ogy to established genres, critics and theorists, was well on their way
210
to achieving that status.41 Within this paradigm, both games and fan fiction,
each the subject of academic study that crosses disciplines and methodolo-
gies, are today increasingly discussed in aesthetic terms. As for the games
themselves, when Grand Theft Auto IV was published in 2008 both the
games media and the mainstream media, as well as the game designers
I have talked to, seemed to agree that a new level of art and design and
emotional power had been reached, although not everyone agreed on how
to describe the change. The fact that it was ‘reviewed seriously on the covers
of the Los Angeles Times’ Calendar section and The New York Times’ Arts
section’ led one mainstream journalist to declare that the video game has
‘crossed some sort of pop culture threshold’ and the industry has ‘turned an
aesthetic corner’, though he concludes that gaming is still ‘an art form in
search of an artist’. This ambivalent view is echoed by novelist Junot Diaz:
‘I love GTA IV’, he has written, ‘and I have no doubt that it is art, but an
equal to “The Sopranos” or “The Godfather”?’ Not yet.42
Meanwhile Henry Jenkins has suggested an approach more closely linked
to the ‘popular’ than the classics, locating games within the category of the
‘lively arts’ described by the cultural critic Gilbert Seldes in 1924 as a major
contribution to artistic expression: jazz, the Broadway musical, Vaudeville,
Hollywood cinema, the comic strip, and vernacular humour columns.
For Jenkins, popular arts in the digital age have their own aesthetics and
their own value, opening up new forms of expression.43 And, this is just the
beginning: cell phone novels in Japan as well as the alternative reality games
(ARGs) and the locative games that use digital and non-digital means
of communication to negotiate, collaboratively, particular locations are also
part of the mix. The possibilities seem to be limitless.
NOTES
1 Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000),
pp. 102, 104. My thanks to Aden Evens, Anna Martin, Nick Montfort and Noah
Wardrip-Fruin for generously sharing their expertise with me.
2 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2001), p. 55; Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions,
Computer Games, and Software Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009),
pp. 11, 2.
3 Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds.), First Person: New Media as Story,
Performance, and Game (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
4 N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambrdige, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 5;
Manovich, Language of New Media, p. 89; N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Saving the
Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves’, American Literature 74:4 (2002):
779–806; Magrit Grieb, ‘Run Lara Run’, in Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/
Interfaces, eds. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska (London: Wallflower Press,
211
brenda r. silver
2002). See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding
New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
5 Powers, Plowing the Dark, p. 105.
6 Jesper Juul, ‘Ludology’, in Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (eds.), The Video
Game Theory Reader 2 (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 362–63; Jesper Juul,
‘Games Telling Stories?’ in Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (eds.), The
Handbook of Computer Game Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005),
p. 225.
7 Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 418, 378, 383, 412–13.
8 Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Video-
game Forms and Contexts (London: Tauris, 2006), pp. 54–9.
9 Mark J. P Wolf, ‘Genre and the Video Game’, in The Handbook of Computer
Game Studies, pp. 193–4.
10 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide,
updated, with a new Afterword (New York University Press, 2006), pp. 135–7.
11 Harry Kaplan and Jimmy Maher, ‘Interactive Fiction, from Birth through Preco-
cious Adolescence: A Conversation with Jimmy Maher’, Adventure Classic
Gaming Site, 17 July 2009. www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/
features/503/. For an emulation of Adventure, see David Kinder’s guide to
Adventure downloads at The Interactive Fiction Archive. www.rickadams.org/
adventure/e_downloads.html.
12 Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 107–8.
13 Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 88.
14 Graham Nelson, ‘A Short History of Interactive Fiction’, The Inform Designer’s
Manual (2001). www.inform-fiction.org/manual/html/s46.html; Aarseth, Cyber-
text, p. 98.
15 Nelson, ‘A Short History of Interactive Fiction’; Montfort, Twisty Little
Passages, pp. 66–71; Raymond Queneau, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (Paris:
Gallimard, 1961).
16 Cited in Dale Peterson, Genesis II: Creation and Recreation with Computers
(Reston, VA: Reston, 1983), p. 188.
17 Montfort, Twisty Little Passages, pp. 82, 83.
18 Ibid., p. 86.
19 Mary Ann Buckles, ‘Interactive Fiction as Literature’, Byte (May 1987): 135ff.
20 Jeremy Douglass, ‘Enlightening Interactive Fiction: Andrew Plotkin’s Shade’, in Pat
Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds.), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story
in Games and Playable Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 129, 134.
21 Montfort, Twisty Little Passages, p. 121.
22 Cited in Montfort, Twisty Little Passages, p. 120; Graham Nelson, The Inform
Designer’s Manual, 4th edn (St Charles, IL: Interactive Fiction Library, 2001),
p. 382; Montfort, Twisty Little Passages, pp. 37, 46, 14, 25, 23.
23 Montfort, Twisty Little Passages, pp. 2, 6; Nelson, The Inform Designer’s
Manual, p. 407.
24 Celia Pearce, ‘Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata God, and Go: A Conversa-
tion with Will Wright’, Game Studies 2:1 (July 2002). http://gamestudies.org/
212
0102/pearce/; Will Wright, ‘Response’, in Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan, First

Person, pp. 12–13.
25 Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 84; Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan, ‘Introduction’, in
First Person, p. xi.
26 Pearce, ‘Sims, Battlebots’.
27 Janet Murray, ‘From Game-Story to Cyberdrama’, in Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan,
First Person, p. 5.
28 Pearce, ‘Sims, BattleBots’; Mia Consalvo, ‘From Dollhouse to Metaverse: What
Happened when The Sims Went Online’, in J. Patrick Williams and Jonas Heide
Smith (eds.), The Players’ Realm: Studies on the Culture of Video Games and
Gaming (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), pp. 203–22.
29 Wright, ‘Response’, p. 13; Pearce, ‘Sims, Battlebots’.
30 Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, pp. 541, 539.
31 Mary Flanagan, ‘SIMple & Personal: Domestic Space and The Sims’, Melbourne-
DAC (2003). http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Flanagan.pdf. David Brooks,
‘Oversimulated Suburbia’, New York Times Magazine, 24 November 2002.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/magazine/24SIMS.html.
32 Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, pp. 550–1.
33 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 135; Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse,
‘Introduction’, in Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (eds.), Fan Fiction and
Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006),
pp. 5–32; Jenkins, Convergence Culture, pp. 16, 136; Transformative Works and
Cultures. http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc.
34 Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context
(Bridgend: Seren, 2005), p. 9.
35 Hellekson and Busse, ‘Introduction’, pp. 10–11; Pugh, The Democratic Genre,
p. 19.
36 Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, p. 304.
37 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, pp. 153–61, 177–82.
38 Hellekson and Busse, ‘Introduction’, pp. 9–10; Community Profile, Pegasus-B:
Sliding Universes. http://community.livejournal.com/pegasus_b/profile.
39 Hellekson and Busse, ‘Introduction’, p. 6.
40 Abigail Derecho, ‘Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several
Theories of Fan Fiction’, in Hellekson and Busse (eds.), Fan Fiction and Fan
Communities, pp. 65–71; Pugh, The Democratic Genre, pp. 9–12, 25–6; Organ-
ization for Transformative Works, ‘What We Believe’. http://transformative-
works.org/about/believe.
41 ‘About’, Entertainment in the Interactive Age. www.jodyzellen.com/interactive-
age/about.html; Warren Robinett, ‘Preface’, in Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard
Perron, The Video Game Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003),
pp. vii–viii.
42 Tim Rutten, ‘“Grand Theft” Art Form’, Los Angeles Times, 30 April 2008,
a19ff.; Junot Diaz, ‘“Grand”, but No “Godfather”’, The Wall Street Journal,
28 June 2008. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121460385251911957.html.
43 Henry Jenkins, ‘Games, the New Lively Art’, in Raessens and Goldstein (eds.),
Handbook of Computer Game Studies, pp. 175–89.
213
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The Cambridge Companion To Popular Fiction

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The Cambridge Companion To Popular Fiction

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D AV I D G L O V E R A N D S C O T T M C C R A C K E N

What is popular fiction?

for Picoult’s story of a woman’s painful escape from violent domestic

What happens in the home or in the workplace, the relationships among

Defining the field

of the complex interrelationships between readers, genres, media and the

Readers and audiences

suggests, as much a study of working-class culture as pulp fiction. Such

aroused by this kind of fantasmatic reading at the limit is a sign of the

New media environments

World War. These kinds of cultural crossings are becoming increasingly

Publishing, history, genre

In one of its earliest (but still recognisably modern) incarnations, the

But the notion of a mass market is somewhat misleading. For, though

Here each sentence constructs a false climax which is immediately reversed

and his collection of Indian animals, including a cheetah, ‘which wander

that remains with us today, just as Bram Stoker’s Dracula provided a

each other, and this process of segmentation is why the emergence of

26 Franco Moretti, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, Modern Language Quarterly

Fiction, theatre and early cinema

There is a further set of interchanges to be borne in mind: the narratives

Tales of the city

Mr Wallace’s adaptation metamorphoses the vagrants of the French capital

Simultaneous internationalisation and localisation was also the fate of

The hero of Sue’s lurid narrative is Rodolphe, an aristocrat in disguise who

Melodrama and sensation

[C]ontrasts of a strange nature exist. The most unbounded wealth is the

If a drama can boast of a run,

goes from the aesthetic movement to high modernism), others sought to

The ‘no Irish need apply’ is presumably a gibe at Boucicault in particular,

her children, and eventually dies herself. It is a novel of two halves, as it

which, like melodrama, provided a way of mediating historical change, and

fiction. In 1834, the prolific Edward Bulwer Lytton produced one of

Television and serial fictions

Written in 1974, Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural

Written by a Cambridge Professor of Drama on a Visiting Professorship at

American television in 1974, increasingly shaped by commercial principles,

and structuring. Increasingly, in television drama, film was not only a

by the interruption by other routines of domestic life, or, internally, by the

when abandoned at the end of an episode, pursue an ‘unrecorded existence’

The apparent multifariousness of the plots, their inextricability from each

Though death may be a special case, and is frequently memorialised as such

In a sermon at Rugby Chapel in 1839, now much quoted in accounts of

insisted that a doubtful pause was absolutely essential to the pursuit of

The contemporary serial or series, then, cannot simply be explained formal-

does. On television, Esther’s reaction is visible, and whereas in the first-

6 Williams, Television, p. 60.

The public sphere, popular culture

The public sphere

fashion has passed, Habermas remains fairly marginal in these disciplines.

publishing moved from models of private patronage to public commercial

‘Public’ versus ‘popular’

Reading Public, a deeply conservative account of the decline of English litera-

sphere. Anne Radcliffe’s oddly self-cancelling project in her novels of the

Let’s bring ourselves up to date with a reflection on contemporary horror,

The structural zombification of the public sphere

impoverished cultural gratification leaves an unsatisfied hunger that

irredeemably corrupt world, a world so oppressive or evil that only the

non-coercive, valid and transparent is of course an ideal. Literature, as

1 Dwight MacDonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’, in Mass Culture: The Popular

The reader of popular fiction

Writing in 1936 of his memories of working in a second-hand-bookshop-

Undiscriminating, without judgement, a passive consumer gulping down