Scott McCracken

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 appropriation 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 popular narratives of gender and sexual identity and practice due to new technologies (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.

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. 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. 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 Gibbonss Watchmen , and Frank Millers Sin City , both recently popularised by Hollywood film adaptations.

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 books 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 writers name is highlighted at the bottom (possibly that of a man). It, too, barely registers. The passengers 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 writers 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 advertisement. The latter makes its appeal to readers on the basis of a familiar and instantly recognisable genre: the half-remembered cover and cliched titles, connoting ‘sex’, ‘mystery’ and ‘danger’, suggest thriller/detective fiction (‘killing’ and ‘fatal’) or romance (‘passion’).

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 Browns 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 Browns thrillers are notorious. But Langdons love of reading does not make him unusual amongst fictonal sleuths. A very different detective, Mikael Blomkvist, the left-wing, journalist hero of Stieg Larssons ‘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 Rawlins, the self-educated detective in Walter Mosleys series of novels, betrays his reading by his speech: ‘Why Easy … I do believe that you have read a book or two,’ remarks one of the many femmes fatales he encounters on his investigations in Los Angeles.

Ein Weites Feld as Post–Cold War Novel

Günter Grass’s novel Ein weites Feld1 caused a storm of controversy when it was published in Germany in 1995, a storm comparable—in terms of text generated if not geographic reach or danger to the author—to the Satanic Verses affair in the 1980s. Perhaps this was not surprising, since the novel addressed itself to the new, reunified Germany. It opens with its two protagonists Theo Wuttke (known to his friends as ‘‘Fonty’’) and Ludwig Hoftaller examining the recently breached wall, which ‘‘already looked porous, exposing its innards: reinforcing rods that would soon rust’’ (7). Given his reputation, a substantial part of Grass’s audience must have expected the novel to answer the question of what might now constitute a national literature. Strong feelings were bound to be provoked. However, the controversy raises as many questions about the novel as a literary form as it does about the political context into which it was launched, not least because Ein weites Feld was a conscious attempt to use novelistic form as a kind of cultural politics, deployed against both a resurgent German nationalism and all those invested in an ideological interpretation of the end of the Cold War as a victory for the West. Yet if one of the aims of Grass’s novel was to pit the literary against ideology, Ein weites Feld might also be read as a meditation on the difficulty of achieving a literary language that can escape the bonds of ideology. The theme of collaboration runs through the text: language’s collaboration with power, the collaboration of artists with the state and of literature with the perspective of the victor. If Grass begins from the position that it is the artist’s responsibility to side with the vanquished, he also seems acutely conscious that such a position will always be compromised. Despite this, Grass finds some salvation in literary form, notably in the novel’s ability to posit what Jacques Rancière in Politique de la littérature calls ‘‘un monde commun’’ (a common world) (39).2 An optimistic reading of Ein weites Feld might say that it shows the potential still existing in the novel to expand and deepen not just the language of literature but also the language of politics for such a community. As Rancière puts it, in a neat riposte to the classic Marxist formula, ‘‘interpretations are themselves real changes when they transform the forms of visibility a common world may take and, with them, the capacities that ordinary bodies may exercise in that world over a new landscape of the common’’ (Politics of Literature 30; translation modified). Ein weites Feld strives for a literary language that might make visible such a democratic ‘‘common world.’’ It reaches back to the history of the German andthe European novel to demonstrate the ‘‘wide field’’ from which a new post–Cold War culture might draw. It leans heavily on the rich resources of the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 1 Except when stated otherwise, all quotations from Grass’s novel are from Krishna Winston’s translation, Too Far Afield. However, because the title loses its allusive qualities in English, I refer to the book by the German title throughout.

The Author as Arsonist: Henry James and the Paris Commune

teaches at Keele University. He is the author of Masculinities, Modernist Fiction, and the Urban Public Sphere (Manchester University Press, 2007) and coauthor of Benjamin’s Arcades: An Unguided Tour (Manchester University Press, 2006), with Peter Buse, Ken Hirschkop, and Bertrand Taithe. He is currently working on a book about literary and artistic responses to political defeat. MODERNISM / modernity VOLUME TWENTY ONE, NUMBER ONE, PP 71–87.

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 Powerss 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 generation to enter the digitally created world of caves, mazes, puzzles, story, gameplay and participatory culture that has indelibly altered our understanding of popular fiction. When the young Jackdaw first discovered the game he perceived it as a world of ‘pure potential’. 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.

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 discouraging than ever before – or so Gissing would have his readers believe.

Editor's Introduction: Modernism and the Everyday

Sitting in the first of the two sessions on the everyday at the fifth Modernist Studies Association conference in Birmingham, England my thoughts, stimulated by three engaging papers, also ranged over more mundane matters. This was no reflection on the papers themselves. For what does modernist prose teach us if not the capacity of consciousness to think of more than one thing at a time. I was momentarily distracted by the sight of a well-known critics leather jacket and began musing on the symbolism of that familiar item of academic clothing. That worn by a famous Marxist critic, I was once told by my leather-jacketed PhD supervisor, had an audible authority. It creaked. The comment was, I reflected, moving further into my reverie, the kind of sartorial criticism that is sadly absent from contemporary research training programmes.