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Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on June 8, 2009
Literary Imagination 2009 11(3):278-290; doi:10.1093/litimag/imp029
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Fairy Tales and Thrillers: The Contradictions of Formula Narratives

Lee Mitchell*

*Lee Mitchell, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. E-mail: mitchell@princeton.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

What lies behind the broad appeal of formula narratives? Why do so many people bury their noses in Westerns and mysteries, romances and techno-thrillers? Or rather, why do some of us dote on some genres, returning repeatedly for solace to distant galaxies or to ravines from which lone gunmen ride? There's never been an adequate answer to that large question, in part because sociological explanations rooted in content analysis fail to capture the draw of any single genre over another, much less the allure of a specific text. And while close study of individual examples—of distinctive settings, characters, even narrative strategies—may help explain a local appeal, we are still left to wonder at the larger social and historical pressures that make them into such monsters of popularity.

Yet if answers to why are not forthcoming, the answer to what binds formula narratives together may be less elusive. For genres with . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Fairy Tales
 

   "24"
 

   Jack Reacher
 

   Conclusion
 

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