Clive Bloom
Related: cult fiction - literature
Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory (1996) - Clive Bloom
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]"It is far too simplistic to argue that each time a woman reads a magazine advocating heterosexual marriage, or a Barbara Cartland novel, a rubber fetishist goes and buys a favorite magazine or a teenager buys a Batman comic that they are equally vulnerable, equally exploited, equally duped. To patronize every reader of Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins is to grossly misjudge and diminish the subject." - (Clive Bloom in Cult Fiction, 1996)
Cult fiction authors
Clive Bloom was born in London and educated at Essex and Southampton Universities. He lives and works in East London and is the author and editor of many works on popular culture, cultural history and literary criticism. His recent books include Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts, Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory; Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 and Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond, all of which have enjoyed international recognition. He is also an occasional feature writer for the London Evening Standard, regularly appears on television and radio and is quoted in the Columbia Book of World Quotations. --http://www.clivebloom.com/ [Jan 2006]Gothic Horror : A Reader's Guide from Poe to King and Beyond (1998) Clive Bloom
Gothic Horror : A Reader's Guide from Poe to King and Beyond (1998) Clive Bloom [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
Horror fiction is as popular now as it was when Edgar Allen Poe reinvented the gothic genre in the 1840s, and in the late twentieth century Stephen King is the most read American author ever. This anthology presents classic and contemporary accounts of modern gothic horror writing from Edgar Allen Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Stephen King, Barker and many other authors, as well as essays from current literary scholars, providing an essential guide to the genre and the variety of approaches possible when discussing the literature of terror.
See also: gothic horror - horror fiction - gothic novel - Clive Bloom
Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (2002) - Clive Bloom
Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (2002) - Clive Bloom [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
What fiction have British people been reading in the last hundred years? Who are the most popular authors, the most popular books and the most important genres? Such straightforward questions raise intriguing literary, cultural, social and intellectual responses which often require much detective work in the annals of lost literature. This essential guide and reference work is the only available study of all of the bestselling books, authors and genres since the beginning of the twentieth-century, providing an unique insight into over one hundred years of publishing and reading as well as taking us on a journey into the heart of the British imagination. --via Amazon.com
See also: bestseller - literature - audience - Clive Bloom
Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory (1996) - Clive Bloom
A disaster. Too many mistakes to be believed. In the first place: the authors state that there is only one known photo of Thomas Pynchon. Wrong. There are several, many of them easily accessible online. Second: The authors state that all of the novels of William Gaddis are written almost entirely in dialogue. Wrong again. The Recognitions is not written that way. Also, the authors do not include David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, which is one of the major cult books around.
Other errors abound, too numerous to list here. While an interesting and valuable idea, this book is simply too badly executed to be of any real use. --amazon.com
Here is an exploration of pulp literature and pulp mentalities: an investigation into the nature and theory of the contemporary mind in art and in life. Here too, the violent, the sensational and the erotic signify different facets of the modern experience plays out in the gaudy pages of kitsch literature. Clive Bloom offers the reader a chance to investigate the underworld of literary production and from it find a new set of co-ordinates for questions regarding publishing and reading practices in America and Britain, ideas of genre, problems related to commercial production, concerns regarding high and low culture, the canon and censorship, as well as a discussion of the rhetoric of current critical debate. Concentrating on remembered authors as well as many long regarded or forgotten, Cult Fiction provides a theory of kitsch art that radically alters our perceptions of literature and literary values while providing a panorama of an almost forgotten history: the history of pulp.--Palgrave Macmillan
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