AustLit

'This brief introductory essay serves two purposes. The first is to introduce the study of contemporary Australian popular fiction with reference to our wider research on ‘genre worlds’. Using a literary sociological approach that draws on Howard S. Becker’s Art Worlds, our research recognises the multiple dimensionality of popular genres: as bodies of texts, collections of social formations that gather around and produce those texts, and sets of industrial practices with various national and transnational orientations. [...] The second purpose of this essay is to introduce a themed cluster of four essays by Australian researchers, each of whom looks to both Australia and the world for examples of the cultural and commercial functions that contemporary popular fiction can perform.'

Source: paragraph two.

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In The Merchants of Culture, John B. Thompson remarks on the difficulties of writing about a present-day industry, where its swift evolution renders any scholarship on it in danger of ‘immediate obsolescence’ (xi). This challenge is especially familiar to scholars of contemporary popular fiction, a sector of the industry which is in a constant state of flux, where scholarly work can go out of date soon after – or sometimes even before – it is published. This is a particular challenge when it comes to defining genres: how are we to construct genre definitions which account for the fast pace of development?

'In this article, I address this question by modelling a ‘snapshot’ approach to genre definitions: that is, offering synchronic definitions at key points in time in order to create a fuller diachronic definition of a genre. The genre I have chosen to model this approach is ‘new adult’ fiction. Numerous forces – industrial, social, and textual (Fletcher et al.) – have influenced the development of this emergent genre label, which has, in the space of less than ten years, changed its meaning significantly. This article traces the genre’s evolution by defining ‘new adult’ at three key points: its inception in 2009, its period of peak visibility in 2011–2013, and the time of writing in 2017–2018. By doing so, I seek to illustrate that genres are in continual and swift flux, and that if we are to adequately define them, we must do so continuously, by tracing the forces which shape them.'

Source: Abstract.

'The rise of steampunk – speculative-fiction works set in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian world marked by steam-powered technology – has led to a range of debates about what the genre is, what it does, and, more significantly for this paper, what it fails to do. Drawing on a range of steampunk works set in Australia, we explore the extent to which steampunk is able to grapple with coloniality, both in the Victorian period from which it draws and in the colonial present in which it is set. Is steampunk condemned to limit itself to a western-technocratic teleology or is it capable of critiquing or even circumventing colonial pasts? After setting out steampunk’s adherence to the problem-spaces of Euro-modernity, we focus closely on works by D.M. Cornish, Meljean Brook, and Dave Freer to highlight three ways in which authors writing Australian steampunk highlight non-hegemonic subjectivities and settings: secondary worlds and their historical distance, the mediated spaces of alternate histories, and the foregrounding of colonial brutalities in a traditional steampunk setting.'

Source: Abstract.

'Viewed through the lens of feminist criminology, how does the subgenre of domestic noir dramatise domestic violence through generic or subversive elements of craft? Drew Humphries asserts that feminist criminology has challenged, reframed and improved legal definitions and data collection regarding women and violence (as both victims and perpetrators), and that those changes have been registered more widely in the community via media both in journalistic choices and in the themes and features of literary genres (xi). Drawing on this conceptual framework, my research analyses representations of domestic violence in domestic noir novels with reference to feminist criminological theories, including gender critiques of Life Course Theory and the General Strain Theory of Deviance. This article presents a textual analysis of Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident (2016) as a literary crime novel with domestic noir features centring on the use of domestic violence to build narrative interest and deliver dramatic tension, while also identifying the subversion of generic elements to enable thematic consideration of intersectional feminist concerns. I demonstrate that the rise in popularity of domestic noir occurs against a backdrop of an increased culture of interest in domestic violence, arguing that domestic noir narrative strategies leverage the complexities of feminist gains in criminology and criminal justice to give voice to women’s and girls’ experiences of gendered violence.'

Source: Abstract.

' The contemporary digital publishing sphere is one of hybridity, convergence and messiness as the affordances of digital self-publishing channels allow independent producers unconnected to established publishers to enter the literary field. Texts, authors and readers move through the contemporary publishing sphere with relative fluidity. In effect, no sharp boundaries exist around each publishing practice in a rapidly evolving digital publishing sphere. Romance fiction has been at the cutting edge of digital publishing practices: among the first genres to adopt digital technologies, including e-books and self-publishing processes. This article theorises digital publishing practices as a continuum by analysing representations of gender, sex and class in romance novels published by Harlequin, Amazon Publishing’s Montlake Romance imprint, and self-published authors. Operating at an interdisciplinary crossroads, this study combines qualitative textual analysis with quantitative content analysis, using Simon and Gagnon’s theory of sexual scripting as an operational framework for the latter. The results show that all romance novels sampled are largely congruent with Western sexual scripts, however, the self-published novels tended to portray more digressive, postfeminist representations of sex but more conservative representations of gender. Class distinctions are more evident in the Montlake and self-published romances, constructing heroes as a kind of ‘capitalist prince’ (Kamblé) and heroines as working class. This study develops a basis for research into non-traditional publishing practices as the ‘digital revolution’ (Thompson) of the publishing industry allows a number of self-published authors to enter the field.'

Source: Abstract.