Pulp: Reading popular fiction

by Scott McCracken

Pulp brings together in one volume chapters on the best seller, detective fiction, popular romance, science fiction and horror. It combines a lucid and accessible account of the cultural theories that have informed the study of popular fiction with detailed readings of Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Colin Dexter, William Gibson, Stephen King, Iain Banks, Terry McMillan and Walter Mosley.

Scott Mc Cracken argues that popular fiction serves a vital it provides us with the means to construct a workable sense of self in the face of the disorientating pressures of modernity.

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 1998

Reviews

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nice-and-easy overview of where we were at in the 1990s: Finished with boring structuralist and semiotic analysis and balancing the dead-end "it's all bad" elitist and/or Adorno-style views of pop culture novels to recognize the liberatory potential in genre fiction. This isn't as funny as Zizek talking about Hollywood, but it is in that district if not the same neighborhood and not super hard to understand either. If you are working on a paper and need to cite something that is going to wrap up some Barthes and Walter Benjamin in a crisp phrase or two, this book will do ya.

I particularly enjoyed the chapters on "popular romance" and "Gothic horror."

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing spectacularly new here but a useful and readable introductory overview of some genres of popular fiction in English.

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastically incisive, simply one of the best things i have read. Great insights into popular culture and fiction