Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- 32 The Seventies and the cult of culture
- 33 Feminism and writing: the politics of culture
- 34 The half-lives of literary fictions: genre fictions in the late twentieth century
- 35 Theatre and politics
- 36 Irish literature: tradition and modernity
- 37 Scottish literature: Second Renaissance
- 38 Towards devolution: new Welsh writing
- 39 British–Jewish Writing and the turn towards diaspora
- 40 Fiction and postmodernity
- 41 Postcolonial fictions
- 42 Writing lives
- 43 Poetry after 1970
- 44 Ending the century: literature and digital technology
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
34 - The half-lives of literary fictions: genre fictions in the late twentieth century
from PART FIVE - TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- 32 The Seventies and the cult of culture
- 33 Feminism and writing: the politics of culture
- 34 The half-lives of literary fictions: genre fictions in the late twentieth century
- 35 Theatre and politics
- 36 Irish literature: tradition and modernity
- 37 Scottish literature: Second Renaissance
- 38 Towards devolution: new Welsh writing
- 39 British–Jewish Writing and the turn towards diaspora
- 40 Fiction and postmodernity
- 41 Postcolonial fictions
- 42 Writing lives
- 43 Poetry after 1970
- 44 Ending the century: literature and digital technology
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
In the post-war period, the popularity of genre fictions grew in all media. The period 1970–2000 saw a proliferation of genres beyond the standard four – detective, romance, science fiction and horror – to include the ‘blockbuster’, the ‘bonkbuster’, the family saga, the ‘sex and shopping’ novel, ‘chick-lit’, ‘new man’ and ‘lad’ fiction as well as a revival of the popular memoir and the elevation of certain children’s novels to bestselling status. Each of these was a distinct, if inevitably ephemeral, literary formation and each needs a proper contextualisation in terms of the moment of its emergence and decline. Despite a proliferation, and to some extent a hybridisation, of genres, the key popular forms of the late twentieth century remained the standard four. What follows offers a short history of those genres as well as of the key popular literary formations of the three decades. However, before embarking on a literary history of popular genre fiction in the last three decades of the century, it is useful to define just what an account of the recent, the fleeting and the contingent (to paraphrase Baudelaire) might entail.
For much of the century, literary criticism either did not think genre fiction worthy of discussion or simply ignored the vast mass of fiction bought by the reading public. By the end of the twentieth century two factors, the overwhelming dominance of the cultural industries that produced genre fictions in their hundreds and thousands (in all media) and the emergence of cultural studies in the UK and the USA, meant that even those institutions that formerly wished to bar the door had to recognise the force, if not always the significance, of popular fiction.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature , pp. 618 - 634Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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