Popular versus Canonical Literature: Volume XVI, Issue 3, Fall 2024 (Pennsylvania Literary Journal) Hardcover – December 28, 2024

This Fall 2024 issue of PLJ includes a set of book reviews from the Editor, Anna Faktorovich. Special consideration is given to recent and forthcoming popular fiction releases, such as James Patterson’s Raised by Wolves, Brian Freeman’s The Bourne Vendetta, and Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent. The formulas, linguistics (density), structure (plot and character), readability, and various other quantitative measures of quality in these pop projects are compared to these elements in new academic editions of canonical novels, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, and Brothers Karamazov, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Anton Chekhov’s About Love, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. This comparison provides advice for writers on how to steer between keeping readers interested with rapid action, while providing enough information to stimulate their intellectual engagement. You will also find some regular non-fiction academic book reviews that explore topics such as greenwashing environmentalism, and anthologies of feminist scholarship and cross-theological demonic stories. The essays section includes Janet Ruth Heller’s study of bipolarism in Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule, Lesly F. Massey’s reflections on critical thinking Christian beliefs, Keith Moser’s analysis of the rise of the alt-right in Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, Kathleen Murphey’s analysis of sexual identity and gender in Samuel Ray Delany, and a consideration of the “masculine” and “feminine” sides of Hagrid in Harry Potter. The short stories section includes stories by Barry Fields, Mike Guajardo, Lincoln Hirn, and Andrew McKenna. And the poetry section presents a range of different verse styles from Danny P. Barbare, Zhu Xiao Di, Sina Farajzadeh, Lloyd A. Jacobs, Layla Lenhardt, Rob Luke, Gerald Arthur (Art) Moore, John Charles (Chuck) Priestley II, Isaac James Richards, and Dudley Stone.Anna Faktorovich is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press. She previously taught for over four years at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and the Middle Georgia State College. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism, an MA in Comparative Literature, and a BA in Economics. She published two academic books with McFarland: Rebellion as Genre (2013) and The Formulas of Popular Fiction (2014). Her most recent publication are the 20 volumes of the British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization Series (https://anaphoraliterary.com/attribution). Read more