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Responding to a fundamental challenge from feminism, this book proposes that all narrative and its reading are intrinsically inflected by sexual politics. Various approaches represented here demonstrate problems of confronting the gendered pleasures of reading. Questions about self, sexuality and identity within specific historical formations are raised. The objective is to frame, describe and unearth the notion of 'men as readers' as a project rather than as the usual, unquestioned normative procedure.
Drawing eclectically upon Marxist, psychoanalytic and discourse theory, the essays set out readings of popular texts and genres - the Western, the sentimental novel, detective and crime fiction, political thrillers and horror and science fiction - in the interest of provoking other readers to consider critical study of popular fiction as unthinkable without gender as a central concern.
List of contents
Introduction: Reading Popular Fiction
1. West of Everything
2. The Political Unconscious in the Maternal Melodrama: Ellen Wood's
East Lynne (1861) 3. Sherlock Holmes: Adventures of an English Gentleman 1887-1894 4. The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of: Masculinity, Femininity and the Thriller 5. The Masculine Fiction of William McIlvanney 6. Rewriting the Masculine Script: The Novels of Joseph Hansen 7. The Divided Gaze: Reflections on the Political Thriller 8.
Gorky Park: American Dreams in Siberia 9. Bodily Symbolism and the Fiction of Stephen King 10. Popular Writing and Feminist Intervention in Science Fiction 11. Science Fiction: The Dreams of Men
About the author
Derek Longhurst
