Introduction: Closing a Bildungslücke—Genre Fiction and Why It Is Important

Summary

SOME OF THE MOST EXCITING RESEARCH and teaching in the field of German culture and letters today is being done on what is called “genre fiction.” This includes various subgenres of literature and film, such as detective fiction, science fiction, romance, and travel literature. While specialized studies of various individual subgenres exist in both German and English, there are no recent works that bring together current research on multiple genres written in the German language. We intend to begin to fill this gap. This edited collection includes a diverse selection of work on such varied topics as science fiction, detective fiction, and pop literature, all important and highly popular literary genres that have generally been neglected in the scholarly literature. By bringing this research together in a single volume, we hope to demonstrate the vibrancy and significance of work in this area, and demonstrate how the study of genre fiction can inform the modern practice of German cultural studies.

“Genre Fiction” and Genre

What, exactly, do we mean by “genre fiction”? Historically, genres or subgenres (minor genres) such as detective fiction, science fiction, romance, and travel literature have been characterized most broadly as those types of writing that appeal to a wide spectrum of the public and do not belong to the canon of high literature. Such a definition is completely inadequate today. In North America and Great Britain serious academic study of literature has long rejected the notion that only the high canon is acceptable as an object of study. This is why we use the term “genre fiction” here, for it is a broad, neutral term that better defines the works we study. We also choose not to use the earlier and now largely superseded terms “popular fiction” or “popular novel” because of the negative connotations once associated with them.

There is no satisfying exact German counterpart to our English term “genre fiction.” One could translate it as “Gattungsfiktion,” but the term is not used. Instead, the kinds of works we analyze here are generally considered under the general heading of Trivialliteratur, “trivial literature.” The very term makes some of the problems in the study of this kind of literature in the German-speaking world evident. “Trivialliteratur” is defined in a recent literary lexicon as “leichtverständliche, ein breites Publikum ansprechende Literatur” (easily understandable literature that speaks to a broad public).