Defining the Field - Popular Fiction

 

 Introduction - Glover David and Scott McCracken

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        At the end of the the nineteenth century, different types of popular fiction like detective stories, science fiction, romance, and Gothic horror started to develop. Some reviewers say that some parts of these forms go back to ancient times. But the use of new industrial production tools in publishing, the growth of the market due to more people reading and living in cities, and the rise of new commercial media have changed the way popular fiction is made in a big way.

Popular fiction is a broad category that was made possible by changes in the publishing business and the rise of a reading public. In the first half of the the nineteenth century, most books were sold to middle-class readers who subscribed to private libraries. Artisans and untrained workers, on the other hand, mostly read cheap fiction that came out in weekly or monthly parts. David Glover follows the rise and fall of this two-tiered economy as cheap copies grew the market for single-volume books and writers found new places to sell their work in the network of popular fiction magazines, which was growing quickly. The core genres took hold in this new force field, but why a relatively small subset of famous genres were so much more successful than others is still a very hot topic.

At least two things make it hard to find a good answer for how certain types of writing, certain texts, and certain writers come to be the most popular. The changing spatial patterns of book movement over time have always had a big foreign component. Franco Moretti has said that France was very different from the rest of Europe because the French language was so highly regarded at the time. This made it possible for France to sell a lot of fiction while receiving very little. This made it possible for French books to move faster and farther, filling cultural niches before their competitors. This is how a highly popular writer like Alexandre Dumas became famous all over Europe.

When talking about the success of popular literature, it's important to put it in the context of popular culture as a whole. The history of popular fiction leads to another history, which is about the busy exchanges between story-based fiction and other forms of popular culture, such as stage and screen. Nicholas Daly says that during the second half of the nineteenth century, popular fiction was not only part of a two-way commercial flow across the Atlantic, but there was also a close relationship between popular literary texts and visual narratives, first through the theatre and then through film, which brought this new medium into the spaces and practises of spectacle and performance that were already in place. In the early 1930s, so-called "talkies" took over from silent films. Radio and then television, which both offered new ways to enjoy entertainment at home, then competed with films.

In the mass politics of the 20th century, these cultural forms had to be a part of a tumultuous but increasingly profitable cultural field where popular stories moved from one medium to the next. Many of the parts in this Companion try to make sense of this chaos by describing different versions of that moment when the popular is seen as a problem and made to stand out in a very clear way. As expected, most meanings of things are negative. For example, a common type of reading is called "monstrous," "dangerous," "sexually transgressive," or "corrupting and degenerate." Such events are best seen as (selfish) attempts to control and tame what are seen as the most wild and stubborn parts of popular culture.

Popular fiction didn't just depend on the growth of big crowds or readerships; it was also part of a new, active public space where people could talk and argue and where a new sense of public openness could be spread. People could sometimes share their opinions in reaction to reviews in newspapers or magazines, but public opinion could also be directly swayed by going to plays and other shows in cinemas and early movie houses. In the 19th and 20th centuries, people's worries about mass involvement in popular culture have been at the centre of talks about popular culture. Theory and study have often been changed by how quickly people's tastes change. Scholars who study popular literature have been very interested in studying groups, how they form, and what they like to read.

Reading audiences are always changing because new writers and books change what they mean. For example, Jim Thompson's American "paperback originals" like After Dark, My Sweet, and The Killer Inside Me became cult favourites among young male fans after the second wave of feminism. This shows how flexible and different popular literature is and how films and books continue to have an effect on it. Recycling popular books is often seen as a challenge to public taste, as shown by the debate over how violence was shown in the movie version of The Killer Inside Me by British director Michael Winterbottom. Understanding who reads popular fiction is at the heart of these debates, and the question of who reads it is brought up in almost every part of this book.