By Elizabeth Cali
I wondered about the proliferation of various areas of genre fiction across African American novels included in the Literary Navigator Device. Given some ongoing discussions regarding the place of genre fiction - such as mystery, detective, romance, or horror novels – in audience’s reading practices, I wondered which areas of genre fiction have the greatest representation in our dataset.
I used the Literary Navigator to search the each of the genre fiction sections, while maintaining novels as my dependent variable. We have just over 1500 novels searchable in the Literary Navigator. The independent variables – genre fiction – I selected and de-selected one at a time: first the crime/detective/mystery category, then romance, followed by horror, then thriller, on to science fiction, and finally urban fiction.
Unquestionably, the area of crime/detective/mystery fiction have the most novels represented of any area of genre fiction, with 193 novels. Of genre fiction categories, romance and science fiction have the next largest representation across African American novels with 117 and 104 novels, respectively.
Among the various ways to consider these results, it stands out that crime, detective, and mystery genre fiction represent an important and consistent imaginative outlet for Black writers and readers.
No comments:
Post a Comment