7 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women,
revised edition (New York: Routledge, 2007).
An updated and expanded edition of the classic 1992 study of women readers and
their reading practices. Modleski examines Harlequin romances, Gothic novels,
and soap operas.
Martin Priestman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Focusing on British and American literature, describes fiction in which crime
plays a significant role such as the thriller, spy fiction, police procedural, and mys-
tery. The book also includes chapters on black detectives and female detectives,
and film and television versions.
Matthew Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers ( Jackson: Univer-
sity Press of Mississippi, 1999).
Study of comic-book readers and their practices, interviews, history of comic
books, and analysis of the works themselves.
Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
Essential study of female reading practices that challenges stereotypical notions
of why women read romance novels.
Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
An excellent study that argues for the legitimacy of the genre while defining its
formal features and tracing its variations and major themes.
Charles J. Rzepka, Detective Fiction, Cultural History of Literature (Malden,
Mass.: Polity Press, 2005).
Useful for its basic overview of the genre and its features but offers relatively little
discussion of contemporary American fiction.
Corinne J. Saunders, A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary
(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004).
Although focusing on British examples, offers discussions of genre variations,
identifying their main features and association with women writers and readers.
John Scaggs, Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2005).
A thorough overview that delineates the various permutations including crime
narratives, mystery and detective fiction, hard-boiled, police procedural, crime
thriller, and historical crime fiction.
David Seed, ed., A Companion to Science Fiction (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005).
Excellent resource divided into sections on the development, issues, genres and
movements, and films of science fiction.
John Sutherland, Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2007).
An easy-to-read historical overview of popular fiction. The book does not treat
contemporary American literature specifically, although definitions in chapter 1
and the historical overview of American bestsellers in chapter 4 are helpful.