The Australian Popular Fictions Research Community aims to create the most comprehensive resource relating to authors, texts and the publishing history of Australian popular, pulp and genre fiction by drawing together readers and scholars working in the field of popular culture research as it relates to literary narratives across Australian history.

As with other AustLit projects, the Australian Popular Fictions Research Community is planned to be an ongoing and evolving project which will, over time, result in the expansion of available information relating to graphic novels and comics, horror, fantasy and lesbian and gay themed popular fiction. The project will uncover the long, prolific and profitable industry of mass market genre fiction publishing.

AustLit's coverage of popular fictions is, in relative terms, quite strong and has already benefited significantly from the participation of scholars who recognise the value of developing specialist datasets to support their analytical work. In addition, research for The Bibliography of Australian Literature, contributed thousands of bibliographical records relating to the works of Australian pulp and crime fiction writers. In addition, AustLit has indexed the large collection of Australian romance fiction held in the Fryer Library at The University of Queensland. At the core of this collection are almost 1,500 titles accumulated by Dr Juliet Flesch during the course of her academic work in the field. Dr Flesch has long been a proponent of a more informed academic approach to Australian romance fiction.

The Australian Popular Fictions project will also be enhanced by work underway for the Australian Periodicals project which is indexing the literary content of dozens of magazines and newspapers published during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. A great deal of early popular fiction was published in magazines and serialised in newspapers and never appeared in book format. The Australian Magazines of the Twentieth Century project also provides details on the activities of many magazines published in the twentieth century, including those publishing fiction included in the Popular Fictions Research Project.

Currently supported research projects in this field include:

• Dr Toni Johnson-Woods's Australian Pulp Fiction Industry project is a comprehensive dataset of biographical and bibliographic details on more than 100 authors, their works and the cover art from more than 5,000 books. It also contains a variety of material from radio serials and comics and includes information on romance, crime, western, science, horror, and sports fiction with a specific focus on internationally successful authors Alan Yates (who wrote as 'Carter Brown'), 'Larry Kent' (a pseudonym used by various Cleveland authors) and 'Marshall Grover'.

  Johnson-Woods has considerable expertise in popular fiction research. Her PhD examined Australian popular fiction serials in the major colonial periodicals and she has been investigating Australian 'pulp' fiction, especially crime and romance, for a number of years. In addition to an intensive study of Alan Yates ('Carter Brown'), supported by a recent ARC Discovery grant, Johnson-Woods has been detailing the extent of Australia's popular publishing industry between 1939 and 1959. For several years she has been a judge for the Ned Kelly Awards (Crime fiction), Aurealis Awards (Speculative Fiction) and Australian Romance Book of the Year awards.

• Dr Kim Wilkins's work on the representation of medievalism in post-1995 Australian popular fictions will underpin an analysis of the way medieval culture and ideas pervade, however incongruously, contemporary Australian popular fictions. This project has resulted in the Australian Popular Medievalism dataset.

  Wilkins is herself a creative force in Australian popular fiction as the author of numerous popular novels. As a scholar, she is in pursuit of the representation of medievalism in contemporary Australian fiction to contribute to the ongoing mapping of the specific nature of Australian medievalism and to sketch out under-theorised (perhaps even un-theorised) similarities between Australian popular fiction and its more esteemed 'literary' cousin.

• As part of the ARC funding for 2010 the SpecUlations project is underway to further develop AustLit's coverage of Australian Speculative Fictions. Embracing the genres of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction the project is lead by Dr Toni Johnson-Woods and Professor Van Ikin with Dr Kim Wilkins. Proposed activities include the digitisation of early works of speculative fiction.

By making available more information about Australian popular fictions across time, we hope these debates can be further stimulated.

The establishment of the Australian Popular Fictions Research Community is an invitation to scholars, readers and writers to contribute to the mapping of this thriving segment of Australian narrative culture. Future AustLit developments are planned to include the fields of science fiction, crime and detective fictions and the addition of many more records relating to romance fiction, graphic novels and their creators.

We welcome approaches by specialists in this field, book collectors and genre specialists to assist us in collecting dependable information and publication data across the field of popular fictions. Developments are currently underway to enable AustLit users to more easily contribute information on works and authors included in the database and to assist us to achieve a comprehensive mapping of the field. Users will be able to annotate and comment upon the content published in AustLit and contribute new information or enhancements to existing content. (Email info-austlit@austlit.edu.au if you are interested in participating.)

As with other AustLit projects the work undertaken to create the Australian Popular Fictions Research Community has been supported by the Australian Research Council through the Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities Scheme and its support of the AustLit consortium's work on recording Australia's literary and narrative heritage.