Reading the Popular in Contemporary Spanish Texts

Edited by Nickianne Moody and Julia Hallam

ISBN 0952797803

Reading the Popular in Contemporary Spanish Texts explores print genres that have previously merited little critical attention in Spain, despite their immense popularity and their role in shaping reading habits of large numbers of Spaniards.  This collection analyses the value of popular fiction for understanding contemporary life in Spain and assessed the socio-cultural, political and even economic relevance of multiple genres to the Spain of the last fifty years,

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Shelley Godsland and Nickianne Moody

Now I Know Qué Leer: Genre Fiction and the Literary Magazine in Spain
Sara Martín

Popular Collage in the Carvalho Series of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Susana Bayó Belengeur

The Romance Novel, or, the Generalísimo's control of the popular imagination
Salvador Faura, Shelley Godsland, Nickianne Moody

The Importance of Being Esbelta: fatness, food and fornication in Almudena Grandes' "Malena, una vida hervida"
Shelley Godsland

Transformative Identities in the Science Fiction of Elia Barceló: A Literature of Cognitive Estrangement
Vanessa Knights

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Women's Horror Edition of Femspec

ARPF funded the Women's horror edition of Femspec  (http://www.csuohio.edu/femspec) which has just been issued (ed. Gina Wisker). We have put copies in LJMU and University of Liverpool library, Anglia Polytechnic University library and the Science Fiction Foundation archives and have quite a few to give to members who feel it would benefit their work or that of their students in the area of women's horror writing. Contact Gina Wisker if you would like to be sent one of these copies. UCLT, Room 2B, Eastings, Anglia Polytechnic University, East Road, Cambridge, CB11PT. Tel: 01223 363271 x2062.

Email: g.wisker@apu.ac.uk

Medical Fictions

Edited by Nickianne Moody and Julia Hallam

ISBN 0952797803

Medical themes and concerns have been a relatively unacknowledged sub-genre of popular fiction, but they have been prevalent from the 1840s up until the explosion of medical narratives across media in the 1990s. Best selling interest in medical matters, hospital and personal health stories has hidden itself within science fiction, melodrama, soap-opera, romance, comedy, popular science, thrillers, detective fiction, horror and advice columns. This collection aims to bring the dominance of medical narratives in popular fiction to the surface and consider the implications that such narrativisation presents if we want to understand the place of popular culture in social life.

The discussions presented here examine, film, print fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cultural history, television, European and American case studies, and fiction from a range of genres and periods.  The four sections in the collection look at public anxiety and desire regarding medical issues as they are found represented in popular fiction; specific negotiations of power in fiction particularly gender politics; the relationship of medical discourse to discursive accounts of sexuality and insanity and approaches to the study of popular fiction through the consideration of academic reading strategies.

1. Popular Disease: Medical Fictions and Generic Tropes

• Medical Drama: Ideals, Dilemmas and Therapies - Julia Hallam
• Changing Images of Medical Professionalism in the Star Trek Universe - Nickianne Moody
• Sacrificial Corpses: The Therapeutic Corpses of Agatha Christie - Gill Plain
• From Coma to Chaos: Notes on the Evolution of the Medical Thriller - Susan Aldridge
• Invaders: Shape-Changers, Aliens, Werewolves and Other Dis-Ease Horrors - Gina Wisker
• Labour of Love: Gender and the Delivery of the Nineties Mills and Boon 'Medical' - Val Williamson

2. Questionable Negotiations: Medical Themes and Issues

• Doctoring the Nation: The Representation of Medical Practices in Popular Greek Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s - Lydia Papadimitriou
• Medical Machismo: Gender, Power, and Discourse in David Sharon's Spanish Med-Tech Thrillers - Shelley Godsland
• A Suitable Subject? Questions of Power and Knowledge in the Medical Fictions Lorenzo's Oil and The Medicine Man - Aylish Wood
• Comedy the Breast and the Knife: A Case of Misinformation? - Barbara Crowther
• "That Woman's Carrying Scars": Women, Doctors and Cosmetic Surgery in Popular Fiction - Joanne Knowles

3. Negotiating Boundaries: Gender, Sexuality and Insanity

• "The Defence Set Up By the Male Kind": Male Masturbatory Pathology in Early Victorian England - Colin Buckle
• Thoughts Too Long and Too Intensely Fixed on One Object: Brain Fever and Popular Fiction - Elain Hartnell
• Un-like A Virgin: Femininity Masturbation and Virginity in Fin de Sicle Medical Advice Literature - Diane Mason
• The Madness of King Laugh: Hysteria and Masculinity in Bram Stoker's Dracula - William Hughes
• Going Over the Ground: Pat Barker and the Fictionalising of Psychotherapy in the First World War Trilogy - Par McLernon

4. Academic Un-Ease: Self-Reflexive and Resistive Reading Strategies

• Love and Death in the Emergency Room - Joss West-Burnham and David Roberts
• Southern Landscapes: Heaven, Hell and Hospital - Stephen C. Kenny
• Loving the Abject: The Confluence (and Effluence) of Melodrama and Horror in Mainstream AIDS Cinema - Glyn Davis
• Active Netizens: Television, Realism and the ER Website - Andy Ruddock

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Consuming for Pleasure

Selected Essay on Popular Fiction

Edited by Julia Hallam and Nickianne Moody

ISBN 0952797804

Consumer Culture holds a prominent place on undergraduate programmes and in current research perspectives, but its phenomena and manifestations in public and private life are difficult to articulate and analyse.  This collection undertakes to demonstrate how popular fictions reveal not only the dominant attitudes and beliefs of their era but also, because they are popular, the structure of feelings that underlie these beliefs.  Tracing these shifts and mapping them onto broader social formations such as gender, class and ethnicity are part and parcel of the cultural historian’s task. Only by examining a number of texts and their treatment of  themes do we  begin to get an idea of the

emotional tenor of the issues and the social symbolic value accredited to various kinds of practices in different time and places. The popular imagination documented in genre fiction provides a unique resource for mapping how the emotions, anxieties and pleasures of cultural groups are negotiated with their reading publics and is still largely uncharted.  Scholarly attempts to research this material often cross the divisions that demarcate academic study in the humanities using a range of methodological approaches and interpretative tools to aid their analysis.

This book is divided into two parts, reflecting the broad split in cultural studies between those whose work stems form literary and historical roots and those whose practice is drawn from traditions associated with social science.  In part one, the focus tends towards the literary and historical analyses of texts written for a newly literate mass audience I the nineteenth century with two more recent examples.  Discussions address research that analyses the role of popular texts as barometers of moral value and social worth and the underlying ethical considerations of identity formation.  In part two, although drawing on similar issue and themes the discussion is primarily concerned with methodological issue which address largely contemporary fictions across a range of media.

Part One: Literary and Historical Interpretations

Chapter One: The Ethics of Taste

• Helen Day – The Indigestible Economies of the Victorian Bourgeoisie
• Sarah Way Sherman – Sacramental Shopping: Little Women and Consumer Culture
• Simon J. James – Pathological Consumption: Commodities and the End of Culture in H.G. Wells Tono Bungay
• Lucy Burke – Consuming Subjects: Choice, Ethics and Individualism in Trainspotting

Chapter Two: Identity and Appetite

• Deborah Hughes – Reading Images of Women in Late Nineteenth-Century Visual Print Culture Aimed at African-Americans
• Julie E. Fromer – “Smoking and Pondering”: Masculinity and Domesticity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife
• Amy D. Stephenson – The Representations of Appetite: Women Eating in Three Works of Victorian Fiction
• Heather A. Evans  – Power Eating and the Power-Starved: The New Woman’s Appetite in Sarah Grand’s Bab’s the Impossible
• Grazia Piffanelli – Feminism, Fat and Black Humour

Part Two: Interdisciplinary and Contemporary Approaches

Chapter Three: Methodological Questions

• Edelma Huntley – Murder on the Menu: Consumption and Community in Contemporary Crime Fiction
• Christine Jarvis – Hungry Heroines: The Exploration of a ‘Generative Theme’ in Romantic Fiction
• Angela Werndley – Reading the Romance in ‘Point Horror’
• Mel Gibson – Memories of Reading: British Girls and their Comics
• Linda McLoughlin – ‘Boys Are Us!’: The Commodification of Sex in Teenage Magazines
• Esther Sonnet – What the Woman Reads: Categorising Contemporary Popular Erotica for Women

Chapter Four: New Markets, New Genres

• Val Williamson – Consuming Poverty: Saga Fiction in the 1990s
• Nickianne Moody – Guilty by Conspicuous Consumption: Investigating Identities in Contemporary Detective Fiction
• Matt Hills  - The (Dis)pleasures of Consuming: Extrapolations of Consumer Society in the Science Fiction Novels of Michael Marshall Smith
• Stephen Keane – Event Horizons: Nostalgic Experience in Star Wars and the Special Edition
• Andy Willis – Consumption and Change: Cynthia Rothrock, Jackie Chan and Martial Arts Movies in the West

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