Subcultures Gelder, Ken
2007, 2007-01-24, Volume:
Issue 18
eBook
Ken Gelder covers a remarkable range of forms and practices across many different subcultural groups: from the Ranters to the riot grrrls, from bebop to hip hop, and from hippies and Bohemians to ...digital pirates and virtual communities.
Over the course of the 19th century a remarkable array of types appeared in Australian literature: the swagman, the larrikin, the colonial detective, the bushranger, the currency lass”, the squatter, ...and more. Some had a powerful influence on the colonies’ developing sense of identity; others were more ephemeral. But all had a role to play in shaping and reflecting the social and economic circumstances of life in the colonies. In Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver explore the genres in which these characters flourished: the squatter novel, the bushranger adventure, colonial detective stories, the swagman’s yarn, the Australian girl’s romance. Authors as diverse as Catherine Helen Spence, Rosa Praed, Henry Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin, Barbara Baynton, Rolf Boldrewood, Mary Fortune and Marcus Clarke were fascinated by colonial character types.
Reading the Vampire Gelder, Ken
1994, 20020827, 1994-09-01, 2002-08-27
eBook
Insatiable bloodlust, dangerous sexualities, the horror of the undead, uncharted Trannsylvanian wildernesses, and a morbid fascination with the `other': the legend of the vampire continues to haunt ...popular imagination.Reading the Vampire examines the vampire in all its various manifestations and cultural meanings. Ken Gelder investigates vampire narratives in literature and in film, from early vampire stories like Sheridan Le Fanu's `lesbian vampire' tale Carmilla and Bram Stoker's Dracula, the most famous vampire narrative of all, to contemporary American vampire blockbusters by Stephen King and others, the vampire chronicles of Anne Rice, `post-Ceausescu' vampire narratives, and films such as FW Murnau's Nosferatu and Bram Stoker's Dracula.Reading the Vampire embeds vampires in their cultural contexts, showing vampire narratives feeding off the anxieties and fascinations of their times: from the nineteenth century perils of tourism, issues of colonialism and national identity, and obsessions with sex and death, to the `queer' identity of the vampire or current vampiric metaphors for dangerous exchanges of bodily fluids and AIDS.
Popular Fiction Gelder, Ken
2004, 20041217, 2004-12-17
eBook
In this important book, Ken Gelder offers a lively, progressive and comprehensive account of popular fiction as a distinctive literary field. Drawing on a wide range of popular novelists, from Sir ...Walter Scott and Marie Corelli to Ian Fleming, J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, his book describes for the first time how this field works and what its unique features are. In addition, Gelder provides a critical history of three primary genres - romance, crime fiction and science fiction - and looks at the role of bookshops, fanzines and prozines in the distribution and evaluation of popular fiction. Finally, he examines five bestselling popular novelists in detail - John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, Jackie Collins and J. R. R. Tolkien - to see how popular fiction is used, discussed and identified in contemporary culture.
The business of colonization is often understood in terms of global frameworks, large-scale movements and top-down, 'abstract' perspectives; in which case, the turn to minor characters in the ...colonized world might seem almost like an act of bad faith. It runs the risk of breaking open stable, overarching categories, like the 'white man' - which, as minor characters are introduced, sometimes struggles to retain its ascendancy. This essay pursues the idea of minor settler types in colonial Australia as points of departure or differentiation from the macro-narratives of colonial discourse. Sometimes they do consolidate into something dominant, but they can also disassemble into peripheral identities that the nation might continue to invest in or want to leave behind, depending on the case. The narratives they inhabit are therefore especially important, throwing types together, leading them in different, sometimes contradictory, directions, juxtaposing them with one another. This essay will look at colonial investments in a range of major and minor character types, including the Coming Australian, the rouseabout, the Melbourne dandy, the 'night auctioneer', the Sydney pieman and the 'inspector of nuisances'. It introduces a Sydney-based magazine called Heads of the People (1847-8), which immediately raised - and did not resolve - the problem of who is central and who is peripheral to the colonial economy. The magazine self-consciously drew minor character types back into public life, recognizing that colonial literature - like the colonial economy itself - was continually assembled, and disassembled, by the narratives these figures inhabited.
In this important book, Ken Gelder offers a lively, progressive and comprehensive account of popular fiction as a distinctive literary field. Drawing on a wide range of popular novelists, from Sir ...Walter Scott and Marie Corelli to Ian Fleming, J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, his book describes for the first time how this field works and what its unique features are. In addition, Gelder provides a critical history of three primary genres - romance, crime fiction and science fiction - and looks at the role of bookshops, fanzines and prozines in the distribution and evaluation of popular fiction. Finally, he examines five bestselling popular novelists in detail - John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, Jackie Collins and J. R. R. Tolkien - to see how popular fiction is used, discussed and identified in contemporary culture.
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