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An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction

Thomas J. Roberts

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Description:What is the appeal of westerns, romances, and fantasies to the well-read? If lawyers, teachers, doctors, and other highly educated professionals just as often choose Spillane over Shakespeare, Cartland over Conrad for their leisure reading, then perhaps there is more to be said for popular, or junk, fiction than the usual hasty, high-handed judgments allow. With wit and insight, Thomas J. Roberts reassesses this much-denigrated writing and the motives and experiences of its learned readership to reveal that there are rewards in junk fiction not found elsewhere in literature.Traditional images of junk fiction and its readers are inadequate, Roberts argues. The writing is too often judged by scholarly literary criteria that ignore the conventions of junk fiction genres and significant aspects of the readers' experiences. Not surprisingly, books by authors such as Louis L'Amour and Ross Thomas are seen as fictions that failed to make the grade as high literature - fare for readers doomed by a limited capacity to respond to good fiction. While Roberts rejects these summary dismissals, he finds that the well-worn defenses of popular fiction's worth are just as invalid. Junk fiction doesn't really provide fun, escape, and raw material for daydreaming, he contends, and readers don't identify with junk fiction heroes and heroines in a Mitty-like fashion. Nor do they read it because the stories end happily or according to their expectations.For a more complete view of writing, reading, and assessing the value of junk fiction, Roberts profiles learned readers of popular fiction and also those who read learned fiction or junk fiction exclusively. He identifies major types of readers and books, shows how these divisions work for learned and junk fiction, and then places these reader and book types in a variety of associations within the realms, or "bookscapes," as he calls them, of learned and junk fiction.A challenging view emerges. Junk fiction is a bookscape that has weak individual texts but is strong and dynamic when viewed as a literary system. By contrast, learned fiction is a bookscape dominated by monumental texts, inexhaustibly rewarding but frozen now in time and incapable of evolving. Learned fiction is studied rather than read. Its readers devote themselves to the richness of each single text and to the critical commentary enfolding it. Junk fiction is read by a process Roberts calls thick reading. Its readers are always aware of the changing patterns and rules governing a book's genre, and see that, however slightly, each new story changes its own genre. In a sense junk fiction readers are not reading books; they are reading whole genres and listening to the stories talking to one another inside those genres. Backed by examples of and quotations from works in both bookscapes, from Coleridge and Henry James to Ian Fleming and H.P. Lovecraft, Roberts discusses popular fiction's usefulness to learned readers: how it mirrors what is unique about ourselves and our times, provides a range of ego types with which readers' minds play, and defines and dramatizes contemporary problems. He also explains why readers of junk fiction accept the bad writing, formulaic structures, and sometimes absurd devices that readers in the learned bookscape find intolerable.Drawing widely from literary criticism, the sociology and psychology of literature, and popular culture, An Anesthetics of Junk Fiction is an incisive examination of our discretionary reading tastes and pioneering work in establishing new criteria for evaluating vernacular literature.We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction. To get started finding An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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ISBN: 0820311499

Description: What is the appeal of westerns, romances, and fantasies to the well-read? If lawyers, teachers, doctors, and other highly educated professionals just as often choose Spillane over Shakespeare, Cartland over Conrad for their leisure reading, then perhaps there is more to be said for popular, or junk, fiction than the usual hasty, high-handed judgments allow. With wit and insight, Thomas J. Roberts reassesses this much-denigrated writing and the motives and experiences of its learned readership to reveal that there are rewards in junk fiction not found elsewhere in literature.Traditional images of junk fiction and its readers are inadequate, Roberts argues. The writing is too often judged by scholarly literary criteria that ignore the conventions of junk fiction genres and significant aspects of the readers' experiences. Not surprisingly, books by authors such as Louis L'Amour and Ross Thomas are seen as fictions that failed to make the grade as high literature - fare for readers doomed by a limited capacity to respond to good fiction. While Roberts rejects these summary dismissals, he finds that the well-worn defenses of popular fiction's worth are just as invalid. Junk fiction doesn't really provide fun, escape, and raw material for daydreaming, he contends, and readers don't identify with junk fiction heroes and heroines in a Mitty-like fashion. Nor do they read it because the stories end happily or according to their expectations.For a more complete view of writing, reading, and assessing the value of junk fiction, Roberts profiles learned readers of popular fiction and also those who read learned fiction or junk fiction exclusively. He identifies major types of readers and books, shows how these divisions work for learned and junk fiction, and then places these reader and book types in a variety of associations within the realms, or "bookscapes," as he calls them, of learned and junk fiction.A challenging view emerges. Junk fiction is a bookscape that has weak individual texts but is strong and dynamic when viewed as a literary system. By contrast, learned fiction is a bookscape dominated by monumental texts, inexhaustibly rewarding but frozen now in time and incapable of evolving. Learned fiction is studied rather than read. Its readers devote themselves to the richness of each single text and to the critical commentary enfolding it. Junk fiction is read by a process Roberts calls thick reading. Its readers are always aware of the changing patterns and rules governing a book's genre, and see that, however slightly, each new story changes its own genre. In a sense junk fiction readers are not reading books; they are reading whole genres and listening to the stories talking to one another inside those genres. Backed by examples of and quotations from works in both bookscapes, from Coleridge and Henry James to Ian Fleming and H.P. Lovecraft, Roberts discusses popular fiction's usefulness to learned readers: how it mirrors what is unique about ourselves and our times, provides a range of ego types with which readers' minds play, and defines and dramatizes contemporary problems. He also explains why readers of junk fiction accept the bad writing, formulaic structures, and sometimes absurd devices that readers in the learned bookscape find intolerable.Drawing widely from literary criticism, the sociology and psychology of literature, and popular culture, An Anesthetics of Junk Fiction is an incisive examination of our discretionary reading tastes and pioneering work in establishing new criteria for evaluating vernacular literature.We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction. To get started finding An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction

An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction

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