Cirrus@Austlit

'It isn’t often that an academic text is as readable as a thrilling, sumptuously sexy, or absorbingly imaginative novel, yet Genre Worlds can be described using every review-trawling author’s dream description: unputdownable. Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher have collaborated to put forth an exciting new concept for reading, contextualising, and even writing genre fiction. They propose a “genre worlds model” which “recognizes that popular fiction’s most compelling characteristics are its connected social, industrial, and textual practices” (1). While the Genre Worlds authors dabble in and draw from several theories across the interdisciplinary landscapes this book inhabits (literary, fan, genre, and publishing studies to name a few), they ultimately seek out and largely utilise Howard S. Becker’s theory of “art worlds” which they assert “acknowledges the centrality of the artist but locates the artist within a radiating network” (15). With their interview-forward approach they are successful in achieving this centrality as well as extending the concept into fresh territory where radiating networks include digital spheres. The authors claim that their update to Becker’s approach is one in which they attempt to capture the “dramatic effects of digital technological changes on genre worlds over the past two decades” (17) and they are mostly very successful in capturing the “shifting value placed on physical and live practices” (17).' (Introduction)