Nancy Drew and Sookie Stackhouse. The Executioner and Sweet Valley High. Warhammer or Star Wars tie-in novels. Franchise series like these occupy a unique position, inspiring voracious (often young) readers while often complicating traditional scholarly approaches to literature.

We seek 15-minute papers for a prospective panel on franchise fiction, mass market books, and pulp at the American Literature Association conference in Boston, May 21-24, 2025.

We welcome paper suggestions that cover any U.S. writers, publishers, or characters who are commonly identified as franchises (broadly defined as any large series of novels often tied to other media and/or owned by a corporation rather than an author). Any of the following topics could be considered:

• Book series with dozens or hundreds of novels
• Franchise books’ interaction with other media portrayals (comics, TV) of same characters and storylines
• Paperback rebranding of earlier media franchises, either as reprints or featuring new material
• Cases where pseudonyms concealed multiple authors of a single series
• Fan studies approaches to franchise literature, including the influence of readers as frontline literary scholars, collectors, and canon curators
• Young-adult and juvenile series as access points to literacy
• Economic influences on franchise fiction, including trademarks and copyrights (corporate, public domain, et al.)

We’re not necessarily seeking papers that argue for the literary merits of each franchise covered (although we’re not opposed to that). We’re particularly interested in considerations of the best ways to approach franchises and what including them in academic literary study adds to our profession.

Send questions or your proposal (with CV and under 250-word description) to Nathaniel Williams at ntlwilliams@ucdavis.edu on or before January 3, 2025.