Introduction
The themes represented in popular fiction are as old as the written word -- murder, love, the unknown, betrayal, fear, adventure -- but the modern history of the field began with commercial publishers and booksellers of the 18th and 19th century, who used the genres of "category fiction" for marketing purposes. Unlike male-dominated prestigious "highbrow" literary fiction, "lowbrow" genre fiction was designed to sell by volume (writers were often paid by the word) and produced as cheaply as possible -- hence the term "pulp fiction," a reference to the cheap paper it was printed on; was often written by and marketed to women; depended on a relationship with a fan base represented by fan clubs, conventions, fanzines, and fan fiction; and was considered culturally disposable if not outright disreputable. Both the authors and their fans understood the stylistic conventions of each genre not as rigid rules but as expectations that could be followed or subverted. The growing and newly-prosperous post-World War II middle class embraced "middlebrow" fiction, a combination of genre fiction's focus on plot with literary fiction's language and themes. The archival collections in this guide represent these and other aspects of the explosion of popular genre fiction in the twentieth century, from the late pulp fiction of the 1920s-1950s through the post-war era of mass-marketed cheap paperbacks to the present.
Overview
The Special Collections department at the Boston University Libraries contains significant archival collections pertaining to various genres of popular fiction. This guide is intended to make these holdings easier to access. Most of the material described here pertains to works in print, but I have also noted archival collections with film, television, and radio materials related to these genres.
The archival collections have been organized into six sections. Please note that several of the authors mentioned in this guide wrote in multiple genres, though they may only be noted for the genre they are most closely associated with. Also note that in many cases, an author's work falls into multiple genres -- Isaac Asimov's Robot novels, for example, are a combination of mystery and science fiction. Popular genres are often used as a way to quickly and conveniently describe creative works for marketing purposes, but the contents of those works are often not so neatly defined. With these caveats, the sections are:
- Mystery and Crime Fiction. The most heavily-populated list, composed of 100 archival collections representing the Anglo-American tradition of the genre. This grouping includes such variations as traditional detective stories, police procedurals, hardboiled noir, "cozy mysteries," and others.
- Romance and Gothic Fiction. This grouping includes both traditional romance stories as well as the Gothic tradition, which often combines elements of romance, suspense, mystery, and horror.
- Science Fiction and Fantasy. This grouping includes both "hard" and "soft" science fiction writings along with works of fantasy fiction, and spans the era from the "Golden Age" of the pulps to the contemporary field.
- Spy and Espionage Fiction. This grouping includes fiction centered around intelligence, espionage, and spycraft.
- Suspense, Thrillers, and Horror. This grouping runs from political and disaster thrillers through suspense fiction to traditional horror fiction.
- Westerns. This short grouping, only two collections long, includes fiction portraying a fictionalized version of the American Western frontier.
Accessing the Collections
For more information on accessing these resources, please read our Guidelines for Access and Use and Visiting the Gotlieb Center.
