AustLit

Welcome to Australian Popular Fictions. This is the umbrella term for a number of ongoing, related projects, led by Dr Kim Wilkins, Professor Van Ikin, and Dr Toni Johnson-Woods, that explore popular fiction and fiction genres.

The aim is to collect and expand the available information and scholarship relating to all forms of popular fiction including crime, fantasy, horror, pulp, graphic novels and comics, and lesbian- and gay-themed popular works and their authors. The project supports research into the long, prolific and profitable industry of mass market genre fiction publishing.

Australian Popular Fictions welcomes scholars, readers and writers who want to contribute to the mapping of this thriving segment of Australian narrative culture. AustLit would like to widen the project to include more information in the fields of science fiction, crime and detective fictions, as well as adding more records relating to romance fiction and graphic novels, and to the authors who created them. We therefore welcome approaches by specialists in this field, book collectors and genre specialists to help us collect and make available dependable information and publication data across the entire popular fiction field.

Related projects

Research into Australian Popular Fictions has been enhanced by the work of the Australian Periodicals Project, which is indexing the literary content of dozens of magazines and newspapers published during the 19th and 20th centuries. Much early popular fiction never appeared in book format but was instead published in magazines and serialised in newspapers. The Australian Magazines of the Twentieth Century project provides details on the activities of many magazines published during the twentieth century, including those publishing the kind of fiction of interest to this Project. Other related projects are Australian Popular Mediaevalism, Speculations, and the Australian Pulp Fiction Industry project.