A brief synopsis at the front of the book states that
Many people take popular fiction as the model for their own writing. Concentrating on girls' use of romance, Gemma Moss shows that they are not mindlessly enslaved to the forms they reproduce, but are actively deploying them to raise rich and complex questions about social identity. Un/Popular Fictions examines the conflicting assumptions made about the role of texts in the social development of children, suggests new strategies for classroom teaching, and offers new insights into the ways in which cultural identities are negotiated.
Here's a long quotation from page 10:
Many colleagues would bemoan the preodominance of the romance form in girls' writing. Such work was often dismissed as uninteresting drivel, and stigmatised as clichéd and stereotyped. The attitude seemed to be that girls were wasting their time writing this sort of stuff and should be getting on with something more serious. Sometimes, when moderating exam essays, I would find romances which seemed to have been marked down below the grade I felt they justified on the grounds of content rather than of technical competence or of use of language. This interested me because only the romance as a form seemed to attract this sort of adverse reaction. The stuff I found particularly tedious - boys' science-fiction epics filled with strangely named computer parts, or endless car chases, or complicated hijacks - seemed to escape the watchful marker's eye and pass unchallenged. Just as I'd found myself unable to take a hard-and-fast line in relation to girls reading romances, so too I felt ambivalent about their use of the form in their writing. Were we just applying double standards here by assuming that the romance was more dangerous to girls than the thriller was to boys? Is the romance malicious ideology on the move, warping girls' desires, bounding their horizons with thoughts of love and marriage? If it was, then how did that judgement fit with my sense of the girls in my classes as strong and resourceful individuals who maybe had no lasting answers to the problems boys caused them but were in no doubt that such problems existed? Once you made the assumption that the romance was inherently reactionary and against the girls' own best interests there seemed no way of avoiding being contemptuous of the writers or at best pitying them for having been so easily deceived.
I became particularly interested in untying this particular knot. By taking a pro-woman line, couldn't I come up with some alternative explanation of what was going on when girls used the romance form, which might validate their actions rather than casting them only as hapless victims of a sexist society?
The chapters are:
1. A Feminist in the Classroom
2. Style and Authenticity: Teachers Reading Children's Writing
3. Texts and Values: The Power of the Book
4. The Influence of Popular Fiction: An Oppositional Text
5. Romance and the Agenda of the Conventional Text
6. Writing: The Struggle over Meaning
Chapter 4 was reprinted in Media Texts, Authors and Readers: A Reader, edited by David Graddol and Oliver Boyd-Barrett (Clevedon: The Open University 1994), pp. 180-199. Here's a link to that via Google Books.
A brief synopsis at the front of the book states that
Here's a long quotation from page 10:
The chapters are:
1. A Feminist in the Classroom
2. Style and Authenticity: Teachers Reading Children's Writing
3. Texts and Values: The Power of the Book
4. The Influence of Popular Fiction: An Oppositional Text
5. Romance and the Agenda of the Conventional Text
6. Writing: The Struggle over Meaning
Chapter 4 was reprinted in Media Texts, Authors and Readers: A Reader, edited by David Graddol and Oliver Boyd-Barrett (Clevedon: The Open University 1994), pp. 180-199. Here's a link to that via Google Books.