Henry Prather Fletcher (April 10, 1873 – July 10, 1959) was an American diplomat who served under six presidents. Fletcher was born in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, in 1873 to Louis Henry Fletcher (1839–1927) and Martha Ellen (née Rowe) Fletcher (1840–1896). His siblings included James Gilmore Fletcher (1875–1960), David Watson Fletcher (1880–1957) and Florence Fletcher (1883–1957).[2] He was the fourth cousin once removed of William McKinley.[3] Fletcher planned to attend Princeton University, but his family could not afford to send him, therefore, he studied law and shorthand in his uncle's law office.[2] Shortly after beginning to practice law, the Spanish–American War broke out and the United States declared war on Spain in 1898.[4] Fletcher joined Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders as a private in Troop K.[5] He served in the U.S. Army, both in Cuba and in the Philippines for two years.[2]

Over the course of the nineteenth century a remarkable array of types appeared – and disappeared – in Australian literature: the swagman, the larrikin, the colonial detective, the bushranger, the “currency lass”, the squatter, and more. Some had a powerful influence on the colonies’ developing sense of identity; others were more ephemeral. But all had a role to play in shaping and reflecting the social and economic circumstances of life in the colonies. In Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver explore the genres in which these characters flourished: the squatter novel, the bushranger adventure, colonial detective stories, the swagman’s yarn, the Australian girl’s romance. Authors as diverse as Catherine Helen Spence, Rosa Praed, Henry Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin, Barbara Baynton, Rolf Boldrewood, Mary Fortune and Marcus Clarke were fascinated by colonial character types, and brought them vibrantly to life. As this book shows, colonial Australian character types are fluid, contradictory and often unpredictable. When we look closely, they have the potential to challenge our assumptions about fiction, genre and national identity. The preliminary pages and introduction to this work are available free to download at the Sydney eScholarship Repository: https://hdl.handle.net/2123/16435 Contents Introduction: The Colonial Economy and the Production of Colonial Character Types 1 The Reign of the Squatter 2 Bushrangers 3 Colonial Australian Detectives 4 Bush Types and Metropolitan Types 5 The Australian Girl Works Cited Index About the series The Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series publishes original, peer-reviewed research in the field of Australian literature. The series comprises monographs devoted to the works of major authors and themed collections of essays about current issues in the field of Australian literary studies. The series offers well-researched and engagingly written re-evaluations of the nature and importance of Australian literature, and aims to reinvigorate its study both in Australia and internationally.

This book brings together new contributions in Popular Fiction Studies, giving us a vivid sense of new directions in analysis and focus. It looks into the histories of popular genres such as the amatory novel, imperial romance, the western, Australian detective fiction, Whitechapel Gothic novels, the British spy thriller, Japanese mysteries, the 'new weird', fantasy, girl hero action novels and Quebecois science fiction. It also examines the production, reproduction and distribution of popular fiction as it carves out space for itself in transnational marketplaces and across different media entertainment systems; and it discusses the careers of popular authors and the various investments in popular fiction by readers and fans. This book will be indispensable for anyone with a serious interest in this prolific but highly distinctive literary field.

Australian crime fiction has grown from the country's origins as an 18th-century English prison colony. Early stories focused on escaped convicts becoming heroic bush rangers, or how the system mistreated those who were wrongfully convicted. Later came thrillers about wealthy free settlers and lawless gold-seekers, and urban crime fiction, including Fergus Hume's 1887 international best-seller The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, set in Melbourne. The 1980s saw a surge of private-eye thrillers, popular in a society skeptical of police. Twenty-first century authors have focused on policemen--and increasingly policewomen--and finally indigenous crime narratives. The author explores in detail this rich but little known national subgenre.