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Full Description
What were women reading in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s? This book presents a major study of the "bonkbuster," an incredibly popular genre of women's fiction in the late 20th century.
The bonkbuster was an explosively popular form of women's popular fiction in the long 1980s. Authors like Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Shirley Conran and Judith Krantz exemplified this genre, selling massive numbers of books over the course of their careers. However, where concurrent forms in media like soap opera and the romance novel have received critical attention, the bonkbuster has been mostly ignored by scholarship. The Bonkbuster: Women's Popular Reading in the Long 1980s engages with these texts, their contexts, and their readers in order to explore the nature, impact, and history of the bonkbuster, offering the first in-depth critical definition of the genre.
Drawing on focus group and book club research conducted with British and Australian readers of bonkbusters in the 1970s-1990s, the volume explores the industrial and cultural history of the bonkbuster, investigating its lasting impact on readers. The books formed a significant part of sex and relationship education for many of them, providing their first notable textual representations of things ranging from sexism to the female orgasm.
The Bonkbuster concludes with exploring where the bonkbuster has gone in the 21st century. As a literary genre, it might have disappeared from prominence; however, its influence remains deeply felt.
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introducing the Bonkbuster
· The Long 1980s
· Scholarly Approaches to the Bonkbuster
· Exploring the Bonkbuster Genre World
· About This Book
2. What Is a Bonkbuster?
· Exploring the Bonkbuster
· The Bonkbuster Fuzzy Set
· The Literary Lineage of the Bonkbuster
· The Bonkbuster and Popular Genres
· Conclusion
3. Publishing the Bonkbuster
· The Bonkbuster's Popularity
· The Conditions for Bonkbusters
· Bonkbuster Branding
· Conclusion
4. Reading the Bonkbuster
· First Textual Encounters
· Bonkbuster Reading Cultures
· The Reading Experience
· Conclusion
5. Sex and the Bonkbuster
· Sex Education
· Virginity Loss
· Working at Sex
· Rape and Sexual Assault
· The Consequences of Sex
· Conclusion
6. Feminism and the Bonkbuster
· Career Women
· Wives
· Myth of the Superwoman
· Exclusion and Neoliberal Feminism
· Conclusion
7. The Bonkbuster Today
· Where Did the Bonkbuster Go?
· The Appeal of the Bonkbuster in the 2020s
· The Bonkbuster Now
Appendix: Bestseller Lists, 1980-2024
References
Index
