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| Marriages in western society are not arranged
by the family and there is no exchange of gifts between the families.
This means that the pursuit of love and romance becomes an important
part of everybody's life. (Are the marriages successful? That's
another question. Many of them are not, and perhaps the traditional
method was better.) A well-known writer of this genre - Denise Robins; another is Barbara Cartland. Mills and Boon is a publisher of a mass produced series. As with the other genres Romantic Fiction may have grown by imitating at a low level such literary writers as Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. The literary writers tell us a great deal about what people are thinking and feeling so that the reader can understand the real problems of the characters - often to do with money and property. The genre writers usually explain very little. 5. Westerns Novels and stories set in the western part of the United States - Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming and neighbouring states - during the second half of the nineteenth century are known as Westerns. The stories may include some historical characters such as Jesse James, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid. They are about cattle stealing, shooting, robbery of the mail coaches and trains, and the settling of these western states. They are often about the war between the incoming, European-descended, settlers and the Indians (native Americans). The Wild West is a favourite subject for films and hundreds have been made. The time of the Wild West was very short and perhaps lasted no more than about 40 years from the end of the American Civil War until the early twentieth century when settled government and police had been introduced. Few of these stories are realistic and almost none are literary. Like the Romance genre they are nearly all fantasy. Perhaps they are the equivalent of Romance, but for men. Is there a literary seed from which they have grown? Perhaps Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (set in the 1790s). This genre is not as popular as it was. Many films both for the cinema and for television have made using Western themes. Like popular stories in other cultures the western film can be used to show human behaviour in all its forms, with the main human types: the bully, the conman, the man of justice, the killer and so on. All these types are found in real life, and indeed often in the same person. It is the world of films which has used these themes to the best advantage. Nowadays films about the West tend to emphasise the role of the American Indians and show them in a more positive light. The earlier films showed them solely as the |
enemy of the European settlers who took their
land. More recent films sometimes show their story from the point
of view of the Indians, losing their land and way of life to
people of a different culture. To the Indians, as protectors
of the land, the new culture seems inferior as it damages the
land. 6. War Many people like to read about war. Perhaps there are some people who had a more interesting life during the second world war (and the Korean and Vietnam wars) than they have now. These books are mainly read by men. As with Romantic fiction and Westerns, war fiction is mostly a form of escape from everyday life. Escapism in fact is a collective term for most of the genre books. Despite the concentration on the details of how guns work the books are unrealistic as they do not say much about the bad effects of war: the destruction, the wounding, the death, the effects on the families of the soldiers, or the historical reasons for war. 7. Horror Some people like to be frightened by what they read (or see on films or video). Perhaps the originators of this genre were Edgar Allen Poe and H.P.Lovecraft, American writers of the nineteenth century. Poe's books are still worth reading and can be considered as Literature. Few of the recent writers are worth reading more than once. 8. Detective Fiction Sherlock Holmes is the first of the fictional detectives to become famous. Arthur Conon Doyle's stories about this clever man were very popular when they first appeared. They are perhaps on the edge of being literature and many people read them more than once. This fictional detective solved his crimes by observation of small details and by thinking (using deduction) about what he saw. This is of course good advice for anyone, though in practice real life is far more complicated. As with SF the Sherlock Holmes books are the centre of a cult in which people dress up as the characters and re-enact the events of some of the stories in the locations where they are set, such as Switzerland and the West of England. Although these writers are concerned with murder, the crimes are quite unlike those we read in the newspapers. These are crimes treated as an intellectual puzzle, like a crossword. Other writers who have become famous through this genre are: G.K.Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James. Many writers of this genre are women. The genre |
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 The Last of the Mohicans (Penguin Popular Classics)    Der letzte Mohikaner [schwarzweiß illustriert] (Jugendbuch)  |
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Penguin Popular Classics)  |
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Poirot)  |
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