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The series offers lively, comprehensive accounts of contemporary German culture written by experts and designed for advanced student readers and scholars alike. Both in monographs and closely-defined edited collections, it aims to introduce major authors, thinkers, filmmakers, literary topics, genres and landmark individual works, focusing on the period since 1989 but reaching back, where appropriate, to the vital hinterland of the 1970s.

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Pop literature of the 1990s enjoyed bestselling success, as well as an extensive and sometimes bluntly derogatory reception in the press. Since then, less censorious scholarship on pop has emerged to challenge its flash-in-the-pan status by situating the genre within a longer history of aesthetic practices. This volume draws on recent work and its attempts to define the genre, locate historical antecedents and assess pop´s ability to challenge the status quo. Significantly, it questions the ´official story´ of pop literature by looking beyond Ralf Dieter Brinkmann´s works as origin to those of Jürgen Ploog, Jörg Fauser and Hadayatullah Hübsch. It also remedies the lack of attention to questions of gender in previous pop lit scholarship and demonstrates how the genre has evolved in the new millennium via expanded thematic concerns and new aesthetic approaches. Essays in the volume examine the writing of well-known, established pop authors - such as Christian Kracht, Andreas Neumeister, Joachim Lottman, Benjamin Lebert, Florian Illies, Feridun Zaimoglu and Sven Regener - as well as more recent works by Jana Hensel, Charlotte Roche, Kerstin Grether, Helene Hegemann and songwriter/poet PeterLicht.

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Margaret McCarthy, Davidson College, Davidson, NC, USA.

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