Popular fiction

Turner offers a reading of Robbery Under Arms as an adventure story and assesses its merit in terms of that genre. The portrayal of characters and presentation of action is typical of adventure stories, but Turner concludes that these conventions…

This article examines Elizabeth O’Conner’s seven books, published between 1958 and 1980, as works which functioned ideologically to implement a desire in post-World War II Australia to reformulate and reaffirm the conservative values of the frontier era. Used as exemplifications…

Had he been on their case, one can imagine F.R. Leavis intoning 'We will not reckon Bryce Courtenay a writer of historical fiction to appeal to adult minds if we think of Roy Bridges'. No Australian author of such fiction…

This article concentrates on the characterisation of Dora, the heroine in the serialised version of Clarke novel His Natural Life. The author wants ‘to cast new light on Clarke’s literary aesthetic, on his philosophy, by examining the treatment of…

THERE are, perhaps, two kinds of hoaxes. The first works only so long as it remains undiscovered. The second, by contrast, depends upon being discovered: only when the hoaxer's cover is blown will the point of the hoax be revealed…

This essay uses the records of local library borrowers' choices in the early twentieth century to approach a body of fiction that has been given many names: popular fiction, forgotten books, 'the great unread', victims of 'the slaughterhouse of literature'…

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…

Australian popular fiction is the most significant growth area in Australian trade publishing since the turn of the twenty-first century yet it has received little sustained scholarly attention (Fletcher et al. 5). Over the last two decades, the rhetoric of…

The scant academic attention Australia’s pulp publishing industry has received to date tends to focus on pulp as a quickly and cheaply made form of disposable entertainment, sold to non-elite audiences. This paper will examine Australian pulp fiction from a…