Introduction

The Association for Research in Popular Fictions was founded in December 1996 after a second interdisciplinarly conference held jointly between the Centre for Media and Public Communications at the University of Liverpool and Media, Critical and Creative Arts, Liverpool John Moores University which focused on cross-media genre fiction. The desire to provide a forum where various aspects of popular fiction, production, content and form could be discussed without spending most of the time available in justifying the activity, grew out of a post-graduate seminar co-ordinated by the Department of Politics and Communications at the University of Liverpool and Media, Critical and Creative Arts at Liverpool John Moores University. The seminars organised for the 1994/5 academic year encouraged the development of interdisciplinary discussion and amongst other areas addressed popular culture in general and popular fiction in particular. Two seminars stand out. The first was a guest lecture by Larry Grossberg which was very well attended and raised the question of ethnographies and how to study the everyday cultural practices of leisure. Moreover, we debated the general lack of material in this area which would enable us to teach undergraduate courses and encouage postgraduate research. A discussion we returned to after a paper given by a research student Alisa Salamon, on the Mills and Boon Temptation series, which directly prompted the first conference. The breadth of audience attracted to this seminar, from postgraduate students in film and television, to lecturers in music, politics and women's studies was exceptional for the group. The discussion raised by the paper was also extremely invigorating, because all of these discipline specialists could focus on the specific texts and the cultural debate surrounding them. The question that was frequently raised by those of us taking part was - how can we incorporate areas of this discussion into our teaching? Where will we find material published in this area? The discussion on popular romance which seemed so cut and dried when we first aired our opinions about Mills and Boon, then became the spring board into areas, issues and debates in a variety of other fields.

So great was the response to this seminar that Julia Hallam and myself, the joint organisers of that seminar series decided to convene a day conference "Romance and Roses". We aimed to hold a small conference which had four strands for papers and workshops: tradition, innovation, focus studies and debates. The Romance and Roses conference focused on Mills and Boon reading, writing and publishing in order to contain and thus sharply define the debates surrounding the fiction. It was hoped that the papers given would raise discussion concerned with teaching and research which would form the basis for a critical Mills and Boon undergraduate reader. Our call for papers asked for considerations of how the success of Mills and Boon marketing and fiction should be situated in the study and teaching of popular culture? To what extent has this mass circulation of material influenced the reading public? In what context should the texts and cultural practices surrounding them be analysed? We were very fortunate to have as plenary speakers Bridget Fowler and Helen Taylor as well as being able to achieve a balance between, researchers, cultural practitioners, writers and postgraduate students. The day was so successful and rewarding that we decided to hold a second conference.

The next year we had a great interest in attracting televisual studies which we felt were under-represented in writing on popular fiction which tends to concentrate on print media. So we decided again to go for a genre, but to try and concentrate on its contemporary aspects. We chose detective fiction although it was a bumper year for detective conferences. Detective Fiction: Nostalgia, Progress and Doubt aimed to incorporate perspectives from writers and producers, critical accounts of texts and the place of this fiction in the cultural climate of the 1980s and into the 1990s. The conference took as its premiss the fact that the detective character and methods of detection have become a focus for contemporary popular narratives in Britain. The conference aimed to debate the dominance of detective fiction across entertainment media. As well as recycling fiction from the 'Golden Age' of interwar detective publishing for the contemporary market, detective fiction has also been appropriated by postmodern styles and concerns. The conference intended and achieved a good interdisciplinary mix. Keynote speakers included Sally Munt and the writer Val McDermid. Papers featured work on 'Thatcherism and the Detective Novel'; the television series The X Files, Prime Suspect & Silent Witness; recent cinema detective fiction; black British writing and detective writers Arthur Upfield, Minette Walters, Patricia Cornwell, Dick Francis and Sara Paretsky. The conference doubled in size and duration.

The 1998 conference Consumption: Fantasy, Success and Desire attracted over 100 participants.  The call for papers resulted in a 120 abstracts. The result was the largest conference that any of us have had to cater for. For the first time we were able to invite people to chair individual strands and those that resulted were,  Intoxicating Images, Gender and Consumption 1837-1901, Hispanic Literature and Media, Radio, Consumption and the New Woman and American Studies. This worked very well and attracted a significant number of overseas scholars. It meant that interested parties from previous conferences could continue their debate and it allowed for very focussed consideration of particular themes, media or subject area. It emphasised the shared interests research in popular fiction has with the broader concerns of popular culture, which the conference programme  opened out to receive.

The  plenary speakers represented our continued interest in considering cultural practices and practitioners; televisual and film studies and empirical research. Maxim Jakubowski, is a publisher, editor and writer with a great interest in genre fiction including science fiction and fantasy, crime and erotica. His latest venture is a historical mystery anthology, Yesterday's Blood: The Ellis Peters Memorial Anthology which includes a number of very interesting British writers. As a publisher Jakubowski set up Black Box Thrillers. an imprint which re-issued American Noir during the seventies. However, in 1988 he opened the Murder One bookshop in London which has proved consistently successful and brings him into close contact with writers, readers and publishers. Jakubowski's immense experience in publishing popular fiction and the changing patterns of consumption and production during the period in which he started bookselling made this a very stimulating plenary.

Anne Murcott directed The Nation's Diet: The Social Science of Food Choice, an ESRC funded project. The findings have just been published and provide a unique portrait of 1990s Britain and the multiplicity of factors affecting food use. It looks at the social meanings vested in the cultural practices of food choice and aims to provide a baseline for historical and international comparison. Professor Murcott's plenary discussed the research practices, methodology and logistics of such a large scale survey.

Andy Medhurst's proposal 'A Pivotal Vegetable: Genevieve Consumption and New Elizabethan Domesticity' was so much in keeping with the ideas Julia and I had when we first envisaged the conference that we asked him if he would expand the paper (with clips) for a plenary presentation. The discussion is drawn from a chapter of a new book on British film in 1950s. Medhurst sees Genevieve as a film which spoke to audiences of the time especially women, as an aspirational text, illuminating a possible (or fantasised) escape route out of post-war 'making do', prefiguring the full-blown consumerism of the later 1950s.

Following this conference two publications were produced Medical Fictions and Consuming for Pleasure: Selected Essays on Popular Fiction.  A third one on Spanish Popular Fictions which was drawn from one of the most successful conference strands is still in production.  Despite the success of the conference it was decided to concentrate on smaller themes emerging from contemporary research and trends in popular publishing or media production.  So the following conferences looked at Parenthood, Place and Occupation attracting about 40 participants on each occasion for the annual November conference.  The Association has also supported and organised much larger conferences at different times through the year and in different locations Children’s Fantasy Fiction at the University of Reading in January 2001, Infection and Contamination at Edge Hill in July 2002 and will hold Beasts and Texts at Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds in April 2003.  The Association has also held much smaller study days which take a topic and present papers so that all the participants can hear them and contribute to the ongoing debate.  The first of these was on Television and the Fantastic in April 2000, one on Charles Kingsley in 2001 and for this coming year three are planned on Chicklit, Punch and HG Wells brining in new co-ordinator and expertise.

Founding the Association to meet the lack of forum for discussion and advancing research in popular fictions has raised several questions, the most significant of which is why study popular fiction? When I teach British Cinema History to our first year, I present them with the fact that although we will be studying films in their socio-historical context, these films are screened regularly by terrestrial and satellite television. They continue to inform the popular imagination. I raise the question - where do we acquire our knowledge about the past? Students often respond from text books or history lessons, but if we listen to the children interviewed after the Spice Girls joined Vera Lynn to launch this year's Poppy Appeal, it was made very clear that their understanding of the Second World War comes from their grandparents' stories and much more directly from the films shown so regularly on television. Popular fiction of one kind or another is a source of knowledge and we need to give students the tools of analysis to interrogate that knowledge and to use their understanding in comparative studies of culture and communication that might make up their degree.

Teaching popular fiction is therefore very difficult because its contextualisation comes from elsewhere. It has a particular relationship with popular culture which needs to be introduced to students quite early on whether this be changing leisure patterns or the growth of the media. There has to be a sense both of the distinctions between textual culture and lived cultural practices and their points of intersection. Students need to understand that popular fiction is situated within a set of popular practices rather than existing as a set of texts or artefacts.

Studying popular fiction can be very empowering for students, it allows them to investigate ideology at a conceptual level, it demonstrates social and cultural change and it can show them a direct site where the battle for ideas is being conducted. It also provides them with a series of tools for analysis that they can practice and which can be used in other areas of their studies. Students have to understand how a popular narrative works and one effective way of doing this is to use the terms laid out by structuralism and formalism and to debate categories, genre and universalism. If they are going to consider the readership then they will have to understand research methods in this field, ethnography, survey and interview which may become tools for dissertation work or the framework for the evaluation of such research for their work on other courses.

Rather than having a canon of texts what popular fiction currently has to draw on is a canon of case studies such as the Open University account of James Bond. The syllabus for popular fiction has to be shaped and organised in a way that brings out an understanding of the emergence of mass literature. Depending on what tools of analysis we want to teach certain texts will pick themselves and students are then in the position to bring a text to the seminar and assessed work in order to demonstrate their understanding and use of theoretical material.

Research has to be on-going, definitive studies have to be updated and expanded. Moreover, we cannot assume that we know what popular fiction is. Since they are dealing with a mass media students really do have to interrogate the high/low culture debate and look at its rhetoric. Charges of escapism levelled at popular fiction are not the answer, but the starting point for questions about its nature. Thus rather than being in opposition to literature what the study of popular fiction has to become is interdisciplinary. We have to be able to accommodate many different reading practices and address the various cultural practices and social contexts that surround these texts. We have to be able to look at content as well as the working of narrative i.e. manifest content as well as latent meaning, perhaps drawing on theory which has considered the nature of realism. Cawelti has shown us that we need to be culturally and historically specific and Radway that we need to able to draw upon anthropology, sociology and structuralism in order to look at romance. Earlier accounts of the sociology of the novel have downgraded popular fiction as fragmented and unable to offer a unified view of the world and which fails to have any transforming elements to it. In many instances this discussion lacks a notion of the popular which can be re-addressed in the contemporary academic climate. Both literary and American studies have started to address where to put emerging groups of writers such a cyberpunk or Irvine Welsh a discussion which calls into question rigid distinctions between literature and contemporary fiction. Popular cultural forms are currently acknowledged as subject to change in relations to different reading practices and as they enter different sets of cultural concerns.

Largely this is the case because film and television studies have had to address the fact that you cannot talk about popular fiction without looking at the industry. Therefore they have suspended the distinctions between art and commodity. Mass fiction narratives are products for a market and not simply the work of an auteur and that has to be acknowledged and given a part in any analysis. Any reifying division between art and the marketplace can be seen as a direct hindrance to understanding the fiction industry.

So what is really difficult to teach students is how the quality of storytelling sets apart certain popular writers and how we use a vocabulary to discuss this without setting up a new canon of texts redeemed from the morass of popular fiction. This is an area which is infrequently discussed and often overlooked in the study of popular fiction. Adrian Mellor has maintained for some time that one of the problems for studies of popular fiction is that researchers are too interested in the content and have very little interest in the texts themselves. The study of popular fiction starts to get interesting with the work of Barthes, Eco, Genette and Propp because they move towards examining the mechanics of writing. The artificial divide between academic courses in popular fiction and those in creative writing prevents the development of interest in how fiction works. There is a whole body of non-academic work from professional writers circles which does look at what Stephen King can do that makes him superior to other people in the field and which has not been taken on board by academic discussion.

There is a capitalist reality test which is given by the market and organises the conditions of production. Bestsellers are not just a set of texts, but a set of production activities. The fiction industry is one which works with a certain sense of imperative and writers do not escape these imperatives. If you want to write a successful thriller, there are certain rules as they appear today and you can break them if you are very good or you want to fail. Being very good means that you have already established a readership e.g. Martin Cruz Smith's move into the historical thriller with Rose. If you want to begin as a writer you have to build a readership and there are rules to follow. Academically unless you look at the standards of professional writers which are in turn directed by the market, then you will only achieve a limited understanding of popular fiction. There are corresponding mechanisms of production which writers understand very well and analyses that cannot accommodate this are therefore narrow and relatively unsophisticated.

So we need to develop and encourage research which challenges all these boundaries and is aware that meaning is not simply at the point of consumption or the moment of production, that understands how a text works and is interested in the different meanings generated by a popular text. When Barthes started to address pleasure in relation to popular fiction he provided researchers in this field with a vocabulary and this now needs to be expanded so that we can discuss fiction with readers, writers and booksellers as well as interdisciplinary academics. For example the production of categories by the cultural industry that produces fiction, organises readers and sells fiction is itself extremely interesting. How though, do we begin to elicit from a bookseller why they stock true crime in the midst of fiction? Why is true crime different? Why has an assumption been made about the relationship between these genres. Peter Mann's studies of the book industry reveal another dilemma, when the transaction was complete, the book was bought, the cultural practice disappears. So it would appear, but it is possible to follow these transactions through concerted effort. It is possible to look at the organisation of readers in relation to the political economy of the industry. Current reading trends e.g. the growing predominance of women readers can be identified and research projects designed accordingly. It is possible to locate public reading, the beach, the library, the train and airport lounges and encourage these readers to talk about private reading, but this demands specific skills and the teaching of qualitative empirical research methods. The time to do this and the assiduous work that it demands will not be forthcoming while the whole enterprise is considered trivial and the connections between popular fiction the wider undergraduate curriculum and cultural policy go disregarded.

The articles published in the first issue of Diegesis cover a range of different media. The researchers are drawn from various and traditionally separate disciplines and they take a variety of approaches to the research and discussion of popular fiction. The second issue of was edited by Nicola King and has a very international appreciation of the pleasures of fiction. The Journal and the Association are here to promote as wide as debate as possible concerning the promotion of teaching and research in the many different aspects of popular fiction open to us. One of the ways that we can do this is to take conference papers which would have a hard job finding publication in the contemporary market and publish together so they can be used in undergradate and postgraduate teaching and reseach. Work has begun on the third issue, which has a contribution on romantic fiction in Finland, discusses the significance of sound and its place in cultural studies and should develop a strong review section. We hope to develop our links with researchers in the field of music and radio studies. The fourth issue will be edited by Deborah Phillips and considers gender and empire. A fifth issue has been planned which considers empirical research for the study of audiences.

Nickianne Moody