Fletcher Popular Fiction and Spatiality

Reading Genre Settings
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-137-56902-8
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 230 Seiten

Reihe: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

This volume moves the debate about literature and geography in a new direction by showing the significance of spatial settings in the enormous and complex field of popular fiction. Approaching popular genres as complicated systems of meaning, the collected essays model key theoretical and critical approaches for interrogating the meaning of space and place across diverse genres, including crime, thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, and romance. Including topics such as classic English ghost stories, blockbuster Antarctic thrillers, prize-winning Montreal crime fiction, J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, and China Miéville's Bas-Lag, among others, this book brings together analyses of the real-and-imagined settings of some of the most widely read authors and texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to show how they have an immeasurable impact on our spatial awareness and imagination.

Lisa Fletcher is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Her books include Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (2008), and (with Ralph Crane) Cave: Nature and Culture (2015). Her current research focuses on twenty-first-century Australian popular fiction.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fletcher, Lisa

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Acknowledgments;7
2;Contents;9
3;About the Editor;11
4;Notes on Contributors;12
5;List of Figures;15
6;List of Table;16
7;Introduction: Space, Place, and Popular Fiction;17
7.1;Notes;23
8;Cave Genres/Genre Caves: Reading the Subterranean Thriller;25
8.1;Notes;39
9;Unstable Places and Generic Spaces: Thrillers Set in Antarctica;41
9.1;Scale, Setting, and Place: Categorizing “Antarctic Thrillers”;44
9.2;“The Most Murderous Environment on Earth”: Matching Place and Genre;49
9.3;“The Hovercraft Raced Across the Ice Plain”: Resisting Place in Ice Station;53
9.4;Notes;57
10;Chronotopic Reading of Crime Fiction: Montréal in La Trace de l’Escargot;60
10.1;Chronotopes: The Connectedness of Time and Space;63
10.2;La Trace de l’Escargot and Montréal Crime Fiction;65
10.3;The Chronotope of the Investigation;66
10.4;The Reticular Chronotope: Space/Network/Speed;68
10.5;The Historical Chronotope: Time Compressed in Space;70
10.6;The Dialogism of Chronotopes and the Spatiality of the Novel;72
10.7;Notes;74
11;Romance in the Backblocks in New Zealand Popular Fiction, 1930–1950: Mary Scott’s Barbara Stories;77
11.1;Notes;90
12;The Inside Story: Jennifer Crusie and the Architecture of Love;93
12.1;Notes;105
13;Ghost-Al Erosion: Beaches and the Supernatural in Two Stories by M.R. James;108
13.1;“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”;112
13.2;“A Warning to the Curious”;115
13.3;Notes;120
14;Pagan Places: Contemporary Paganism, British Fantasy Fiction, and the Case of Ryhope Wood;122
14.1;British Paganism and British Fantasy Fiction;123
14.2;Mythago Wood;127
14.3;Notes;135
15;Tolkien’s Geopolitical Fantasy: Spatial Narrative in The Lord of the Rings;137
15.1;A Literary Cartography of Middle-Earth;138
15.2;The Eye of Sauron;140
15.3;The Conspiracy of the Ring;144
15.4;Fantastic Maps;148
15.5;Notes;150
16;Commuting to Another World: Spaces of Transport and Transport Maps in Urban Fantasy;153
16.1;Cartographic Imaginaries and Subway Maps;154
16.2;Spatial Tropes in Speculative Genres;157
16.3;Narrative Mapping;163
16.4;Notes;166
17;Mapping Monstrosity: Metaphorical Geographies in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag Trilogy;169
17.1;China Miéville: Part-Time Scholar, Would-Be Politician, Maker-of-Worlds;171
17.2;A Geocriticism of Bas-Lag and Its Politically Transgressive Monstrosity;173
17.3;The Politics of Place and Space in Bas-Lag;174
17.4;The (Grotesque) Body as Zone of Geopolitics;178
17.5;Notes;184
18;Air Force One: Popular (Non)fiction in Flight;189
18.1;Airport Fiction;190
18.2;Product Description;191
18.3;Popular (Non)fiction;202
18.4;Notes;204
19;States of Nostalgia in the Genre of the Future: Panem, Globalization, and Utopia in The Hunger Games Trilogy;206
19.1;Notes;220
20;Index;223