Teaching 21st Century Genres

This book is the first ever collection about twenty-first century genre fiction. It offers accessible yet rigorous critical interventions in a growing field of popular culture and academic study, presenting new genres as a fascinating and powerful means of reading contemporary culture.
The collection explores the history and uses of genre to date, analyses key examples of innovations and developments in the field and reflects on how these texts have been mobilised in teaching since the year 2000. It explores a range of new twenty-first century genres through a close reading of key examples, along with a broader critical overview at the beginning of each chapter capturing wider developments, contexts and themes. As a result of this contextual, text-orientated approach, the book promotes a broad appeal beyond the specifics of new genres and authors, and will contribute to a wider understanding of developments in post-millennial fictions.

Represents the first book to deal with the teaching of contemporary genre fiction

Introduction; Katy Shaw.- PART I: CONTEMPORARY GOTHIC.- 1. Genre Trouble: The Challenges of Designing Modern and Contemporary Gothic Modules; Xavier Aldana Reyes.- 2. Dark Chocolate from the Literary Crypt: Teaching Contemporary Gothic Horror; Gina Wisker.- PART II: WRITING RACE.- 3. Teaching Crime Fiction and the African American Literary Canon; Nicole King.- 4. Genre and its 'Diss'contents': Teaching Twenty-First Century Black British Writing on Page and Stage; Deidre Osborne.- PART III: UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS.- 5. Teaching Utopia: from More to Piercy and Atwood; Kate Aughterson.- 6. Other Mothers and Fathers: Teaching Contemporary Dystopian Fiction; Oliver Tearle.- 7. Pathways to Terror: Teaching 9/11 Fiction; Mark Eaton.- PART IV: WORLD LITERATURE.- 8. Teaching Translit: An Unsettled and Unsettling Genre; Bianca Leggett.- 9. Teaching Contemporary Cosmopolitanism; Kristian Shaw.- Index.