Full Description
First published in 1990, Popular Fiction looks at popular fiction in its literary, filmic, and televisual forms. They range across the main genres of popular fiction: science fiction, soap opera, detective fiction, the spy-thriller, the western, film noir, and comedy. Grouped into sections, the essays explore major themes in the study of popular fiction: the functioning of popular fiction within technologies of cultural regulation, the relations between popular fiction and nationalism; the connections between popular fictions and relations of power and knowledge; and the social and ideological factors moulding both the production and reading of popular fictions. Designed especially as a student text, this book will be invaluable to students of English and literary studies, media studies, film and TV studies, communication studies, and cultural studies.
Contents
New Preface Series editors' preface Preface Acknowledgements 1. The technology and the society 2. On screen, in frame: film and ideology 3. Broadcast TV as cultural form 4. 'While Millicent bucked and writhed...' 5. Apprehensions of time 6. The language of detection 7. Scotland and cinema: the iniquity of the fathers 8. Representing the nation 9. Afterthoughts on 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema' inspired by Duel in the Sun 10. Women in film noir 11. Sexual disguise and cinema 12. The search for tomorrow in today's soap operas 13. From the flaneur to the detective: interpreting the city of Poe 14. Clues 15. Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: clues and scientific method 16. Deconstructing the text: Sherlock Holmes 17. Send-up: authorship and organization 18. The making of (the) MTM (show) 19. Made in Ealing 20. Out of what past? Notes on the B film noir 21. The operational aesthetic 22. Peter Pan and the commercialization of the child 23. Figures of Bond 24. Television and gender David Morley Bibliography Index
