Books in the Popular Fictions Series series

Most critical writings on horror films conceptualise woman as victim. Creed challenges this view with a feminist psychoanalytic critique, discussing films such as Alien, I Spit on Your Grave and Psycho.

Gelder examines the vampire in its various film and narrative manifestations, placing the vampires in their cultural contexts. The author draws upon films such as Murnau's Nosferatu and books such as Anne Rice's historical vampire chronicles.

How is comedy related to its institutional context? Neale and Krutnik, in this wide-ranging discussion of the genre, propose that comedy always involves deviation from aesthetic and cultural conventions and norms.

Science Fiction Audiences considers the continuing popularity of two television 'institutions' of our time through an examination of their followers and fans.

Explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre. This book includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF novelists and theorists.

Explores the ways in which romance authors have sought to represent our fantasies of life in the past ever since the first "cloak and dagger" tales of the 1930's. It examines how, with the social upheaval of the war, these cut-and-thrust swashbucklers gave way to the female-oriented romances.