“[…] his old woman is a mischievous beldam, and that the plates in question never appeared anywhere till they were published in the Horticultural Journal. We hate old women at the best of times, but a lying old woman is abominable, and the sooner Loudon shakes the hag off the better” (Desmond, 1980:90)

No-one else speaks of Jane Webb Loudon in this way but little is really known about her.  Her daughter reports that she burnt all her personal papers just before her death and any reference to her own accomplishments in her husband’s biography is brief and modest.  However, the evidence of the vituperative nature of early popular periodical publishing, which JW Loudon entered as the editor of The Ladies’ Magazine of Gardening (1841), caught the imagination of Andrew King who asked me to research more about early professional women writers in this field for Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.  While doing so, and feeling that I was working on something relatively obscure, I came across three other colleagues who I know from studies in twentieth century science fiction, gothic and the supernatural and children’s literature, who have all worked on Loudon and all bemoaned the gaps in our knowledge.  So Andy Sawyer and I met for our long awaited Loudon Lunch to see how we could bring researchers together to resolve this situation.

 Andy Sawyer, the librarian for the Science Fiction Foundation collection at the University of Liverpool, is particularly interested in the relationship between Mary Shelley and Jane Loudon as they formulate an English vocabulary for speculative accounts of the future.  “You can’t”, Sawyer says, “mother science fiction twice, so there has to be a more nuanced way to think about the early contribution these women writers made to science fiction”.  Both of us are interested in Loudon’s early years as a writer, her role as a salaried contributor for the prominent editor Jerdan, her friendship with Catherine Crowe, and her early involvement with a number of cultural figures: John Martin and his family, Wilkie Collins, the Howitts and the Landseers as well as the editor Tom Taylor who would be so important for Punch. Andy Sawyer directed me to the Crowe/Larken collection at the University of Kent and to Lucy Sussex, who has a chapter on Crowe in her forthcoming book for Palgrave Macmillan, Women Writers and Detectives in the Nineteenth Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre.

 Tracking down materials as well as finding experts in the different fields in which Loudon wrote has proved an interesting trail to follow.  Bea Howe’s popular biography of Jane Webb Loudon (which Heath Schenker describes as highly fictionalized) had the benefit of drawing on her adolescent daughter’s diary.  However, just beginning to contact researchers who might be interested in contributing to a conference on Loudon’s life and work has revealed a manuscript which has recently come into the possession of Sheffield Hallam University. Alan Rauch, contemporary editor for the The Mummy and author of Useful Knowledge, The Victorians, Morality and the March of Intellect, is hopeful that someone will find the correspondence between Loudon and Walter Scott.  It would be interesting to know more about Loudon’s father and his possible connections with scientists in eighteenth-century Birmingham.  Further investigation of Loudon’s dealings with the publishers Bradbury and Evans might reveal unknown creative ventures from her later years.

  I am very fortunate to be working not only with Andy Sawyer but also Georgina O’Brien Hill, who had originally planned a conference on later nineteenth century women and science fiction.  Her colleague Michelle Parslow has worked on both Loudon and fin de siècle women’s science fiction and was inspired by the discussion at the ‘Utopian Spaces of British Literature and Culture 1890-1945’ conference held at the University of Oxford in September last year.  By combining fictional and educational engagements with science, we can bring together several different academic approaches and areas of knowledge in order to understand women’s contribution to these genres during the nineteenth century.  The life, work and example of Jane Webb Loudon has enabled us to compose a call for papers that should be meaningful to a large number of different networks: those interested in popular science, the periodical press, the articulation of social reform across the nineteenth century, gardening, education, natural history, professional writing, the development of science fiction and the formation of Victorian domestic sensibility.   So a conference is set for 27^th -28^th June 2011 at Trinity University Leeds and we are very fortunate to have Matthew Beaumont, Alan Rauch, Andy Sawyer and Ann Shteir as plenary speakers.

 For me it is Loudon’s tales of fauna rather than flora which have stayed with me as she addressed myth and anecdote with her own observations.  The tales she tells of natural history look at the place of domestic animals in everyday life, during a time in which their cultural welfare undergoes immense social change.  She notes “the agacity of the cat in detecting criminals” (1851:50) and their need to revenge human cruelty.  In doing so she reveals her own life in her writing: “my mother had a servant who disliked cats exceedingly, and particularly a large black cat which we had, which she was in the habit of beating whenever she had the opportunity.  The cat disliked the girl but was always afraid of her: one day, however, when the girl was carrying some dishes downstairs into the kitchen, and had both her hands full, the cat flew at her, and scratched her arms and face severely” (1851:51). 

Nickianne Moody, ARPF Convenor, Liverpool John Moores University.

 For references see Loudon bibliography; additions gratefully received.

WBD is one of a range of initiatives to entice the reluctance reader into the bookshop which have been promoted by the book trade, i.e. reading groups, government strategies such as the ‘Year of Reading’ and literacy charities which enable authors to meet their young readers.  The most successful of these has to be The Big Read in 2003.  The BBC’s involvement was central for this community outreach programme as it offered high profile television coverage alongside other media platforms, with participation by the general public at external events, such as those still being continued by WBD.   The Big Read promoted the message that celebrities and ordinary people were passionate about reading and confident about the pleasures of popular books.

Discussions during that year as the nation debated its favourite books, found that participants regularly commented on disappointing comparisons between childhood and adult reading; they saw adult reading as governed by a literary paradigm that legitimates intellectual pleasure but dismisses the emotional pleasures of childhood experience of books.  Research which had informed the government’s 1999 Reading and Literacy Campaign adopted a strategy of jettisoning books and the chore of a book at bedtime in order to motivate parental involvement and support for a far more functional approach to their child’s reading (Broadbent, 2000). 

So although WBD focuses on children and very young potential readers, who may enjoy the bounce and rhyme sessions held today at local libraries, the charity is also thinking of the third of people in the UK identified by a 2005 Bookseller survey as never reading books.  The research discovered that readers were polarised between being non-readers (34%) and heavy readers who read on average over half an hour a day and bought between 30 to 40 books a year (Dean 2005).  So WBD Ltd returns us to the pleasures of reading.  The cartoon motifs for the pages of the charity’s website affirm the relationship between reading and consumption, showing a girl eating sweets but not taking her eyes from the comic in her lap.  Books are larger than the children who read them, and a boy in a car is surprised by the book he is reading, while one girl reads while flying accompanied by her co-pilot cat.  That reminds me: WBD heralds the coming of another important feast day, for Gertrude of Nivelles, the patron saint of cats and catlovers, on March 17^th.  I hope that you enjoy either or both of these celebrations.

Nickianne Moody, ARPF Convenor, Liverpool John Moores University.

 Broadbent, T (2000) ‘Reading and literacy- how advertising mobilised parents to help improve the reading ability of their children’ Advertising Works 11 World Advertising Research Centre, Henley-on-Thames

Dean, J (2005) ‘Readers like us’ The Bookseller, February 11 ‘Expanding the Market Supplement’

Urban fantasy is definitely a recognisable commercial category, with publishers urging romance, horror and crime writers to take up its wise-cracking gritty realism.  There is a debate about the actual ur-text but Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, which was published in Britain in the mid-1990s, both integrates paranormal beings into a investigative narrative structure and engages the reader through speculation on the civil rights inherent in their legitimate acceptance into human society.  As well as paranormal romance, holding the range of texts together is a re-evaluation of heroic engagement with crime, reconfigurations of the monstrous (such as those created by Anne Rice in the 1970s) and the politics of identity taken to fantastic extreme.  An emerging diegesis since the end of the last century, the paranormal as part of everyday life, bolstered by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is recognised by audiences, retailers and publishers alike, although it does have a tendency to roam around the bookstore in search of a permanent home.  Currently Waterstones’ marketing has settled on ‘dark fantasy’, but you still have to go to the back of the store, where romance has currently been relegated, to pick up certain authors in the genre.

There is a lot of flexibility in this category, from its setting, attitude to crime and violence and the range of supernatural beings encountered – werewolves, magic, demons, witchcraft, necromancy, vampires, genies, elementals, genetic enhancement, faerie, shapechangers, ghosts, angels, shamanism, dragons, divine beings, parallel planes of existence and the cybermage – all co-existing with mobile phones rather than alembics.  The covers for popular authors in this category, such as Kim Harrison, Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs and Jim Butcher, are an interesting study in themselves, with each reprinting repositioning the narrative as romance, horror, thriller, fantasy, crime, chick-lit and contemporary fiction as publishers search out new audiences amongst readers of popular genre.  Now that the fiction is moving from print – which can be dismissed as for young adults – to television for adult audiences who may not be telefantasy regulars, it might be time to look at the dynamics of this section of the market and its ability to articulate concerns about marginalisation. There are also questions to consider about the interpellation of audiences for urban fantasy, especially in relation to the audience for fictions gathered under the label of paranormal romance. The concept of repositioning, whether of the subjects in the narratives themselves or the generic spaces appropriated for these texts by publishers, retailers, commentators and fans, offers many possibilities for researchers in this field.

Urban fantasy is already receiving academic interest, with articles in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts dating back to the 90s and regular slots on the annual conference for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.  There is an increasing visibility of postgraduate students showing an interest in this fiction, especially those working in gender and disability studies.  These studies are particularly interested in the way that the commercial genre interrogates cultural practices associated with popular fiction, women’s writing and reading, the representation of citizenship, and critical analysis in the field of creative writing.   In 2008 ARPF had a series of seminars which culminated in the ‘Supernatural Diegesis in Popular Fiction’ conference.  Cross-overs between studies of Victorian fantasy, consumer culture, intergenerational exchange of knowledge, disability and the British bestselling ‘urban fantasist’ Terry Pratchett made for good interdisciplinary discussion.  Providing a bibliography for sub-genres of commercial fiction is common practice in the States and proved very useful when I was a postgraduate, so a fledgling one on critical works for this genre is now up on the network page for Gothic and Urban fantasy on this website.

Urban fantasy is culturally resonant for more than its dramatisation of gendered politics which are present in the romantic adventures of its paranormally enhanced heroines.  Urban fantasy posits an account of governance and ethical decision making.  Critical Studies in Television posted an interesting cfp from the Blackwell Philosophy and Popular Culture Series “written to engage the intelligent reader”.  Its wish list for essays on True Blood included ‘the ethics of reading minds’, ‘the nature of humanity’, ‘the responsibility of vampire creation’, the potential ‘social contract between humanity and supernatural beings’ and contrasts and continuities between ‘the moral codes in True Blood and Twilight’.  Fortunately, there are a range of conferences where this debate could continue during 2010, though Blackwell’s topics may not be exactly what we will choose to discuss.  We start in Liverpool with Alex Tankard’s seminar paper ‘Body Modification and Dangerous Intimacy in Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse Novels’ on Monday 15^th March.   There is also room on the Urban Gothic programme (LJMU, 24^th April 2010) which focuses on localised gothic, phantasmogenetic centres and the urban underworld.  The cfp is still open and details of this event and others being held across Britain on vampires (the Hertfordshire vampire conference had an enormous response to its cfp), werewolves and angels and demons are currently posted on the network page for Gothic and Urban Fantasy.  By creating this combination of genres I am possibly denying the importance of the commercial typology that frames urban fantasy, but I am acknowledging a continuity of fin de siècle fiction concerned with gender, corruption, technology and the mysterious powers of cats.

Nickianne Moody, ARPF Convenor, Liverpool John Moores University.

This is doubly appreciated because the cat free refuge that was Borders is now closed, probably in the face of Amazon’s ability to resolve consumer problems through frictionless technology.  Waterstones certainly seems to think that e-readers are culpable in their poor holiday sales figures.  Jeff Bezos’ address to early adopters clearly states that the design brief was for “the Kindle to disappear in your hands” allowing the customer to “quickly forget that you are reading on an advanced wireless device and instead be transported into that mental realm readers love…” I still think the absence of fang marks in book covers is an essential marketing plus.

However, Bezos’ ability to turn an avowed luddite into a early adopter is through effective incentive.  My device was ordered the Monday before the big freeze in Britain, left New York at lunch time and arrived in the midst of the snow 15 minutes before the third year’s Popular Fiction and Publishing exam.  Before the exam started it was powered up, had welcomed me by name, downloaded Pride Prejudice and Zombies and was then used to while away invigilation.  The students were dealing with these very pertinent issues:

Choose one of the following –

1.  Account for the reasons why recommendation is such an important strategy for booksellers retailing an “experience commodity”.

2.  Identify cultural values underlying Christmas sales strategies which target customers buying books as gifts.

3.  Critically analyse the value placed on books for children in the context of contemporary publishing and bookselling.

4.  To what extent is textual analysis as important to the study of the bestseller as an understanding of the cultural practices around reading?

I hope the Kindle provided some inspiration.

All this embracing of new technology during 2010 is there to seriously relaunch ARPF as a network.  There is a lot of activity in our field of research but it is still dispersed across the interdisciplinary spectrum.  Lack of funding has provided further incentive to move to electronic media.  It allows both for archiving and alerts, which hopefully will serve many different interests and continue ARPF’s aim to make contact and promote exchange with diverse research communities and expertise. 

The first announcement to make is the ARPF conference Popular Fictions: Selling Culture? 20^th-21^st November 2010.  This should be a forum which accommodates more than just the debate about e-reading and considers the eighteenth and nineteenth century marketplace, other forms of entertainment media and the current political and commercial climate for popular narrative forms.  

Updates on this page will be used to promote research in popular fiction studies by gathering relevant news and by directing users to the website’s features such as new publications (reviews where possible), conference cfps and reports, archives and research reports and network activities.  The Kindle, I note, even promotes and supports blogging but I’m not sure that I can type one handed as the other is sure to be pinned down by one cat or another.

Nickianne Moody, ARPF Convenor, Liverpool John Moores University.

Should you be looking for a particular file contact me at arpfmail@yahoo.co.uk and I’ll be happy to mail it out to you in the mean time.

Best wishes for 2010,
Nickianne