Popular Fiction

 

 Introduction - Glover David and Scott McCracken

[alert-success] Popular Fiction

[/alert-success]

[alert-primary] Summary [/alert-primary]

[btn href="https://www.speedynotes.in/2023/07/introduction-glover-david-and-scott.html" class="bt" btn]Back[/btn]

        Popular fiction is a term that has changed over time and is often left unclear. People often think of it as a list of books that everyone reads. They usually picture it as a league table of best-sellers, whose numbers show how well they can reach people from different backgrounds and cultures and still do well in the marketplace. But this vague description doesn't tell us much, since it makes it sound like popular fiction is just a big empty box where almost any book could make a lot of money.
        Seven of the top ten print fiction books in Britain in the first week of July 2010 were crime stories by authors like Stieg Larsson, Harlan Coben, James Patterson, Lynda La Plante, and Patricia Cornwell. These books could be called "murder mysteries," "crime thrillers," "police procedurals," or "detective fiction," among other things. There is another way to look at popular fiction that comes from the fact that you can pick out recurring themes and plots in these weekly collections. Most popular fiction is built on a small number of types of story pleasure, such as tension, love difficulties, body horror, or thought about the future. These sets of techniques do a good job of bringing their viewers to life by using imaginary hooks that pull readers into the text and make them want to do it again and again.
        But there are two important things to note about popular fiction. First, most popular genres, like "crime fiction" and "romance," aren't as tightly organised as the idea of addiction suggests. Crime stories don't really fit into a single group because they are so different. In Picture Perfect, there is a riddle and an investigation, but the story is also about making sense of mental entrapment and dealing with hard personal relationships.
        Gender is always a big part of both of these writers' work, even though they are very different in other ways. This is true for all of the weekly charts, which suggests that the connections between general features and sexual difference are a big part of what makes a book a bestseller. Each week, the mix of themes in the ten best-selling paperbacks changes in a small way. In the week after the first list of best-selling paperbacks came out in July, Take a Chance on Me by 'chick lit' author Jill Mansell and True Blue by David Balducci, a thriller about a former female police officer trying to get her old job back on the force, pushed out two crime stories. Picture Perfect took over the top spot because it sold over 14,000 more copies in a week than the book that was there before it, which was a collection of short stories by the Irish author Maeve Binchy.
        The second important thing to know about popular fiction is that most of its readers are not all the same. This short survey shows that there are two distinct but overlapping groups of popular fiction readers: those who are the most like Amis's "addicts," who are stuck in a certain genre or subgenre even though they often read books that don't sell a lot, and a larger, more diverse group that moves in and out of the different parts of the popular fiction market. These readers might pick up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, but they wouldn't have to read crime fiction next. The idea of what is popular is complicated and always changing. It shows the tension between what people want and what the culture business wants. A culture expert named Stuart Hall called this the "double movement of containment and resistance." The culture field is always changing, torn apart by different interests and ties.
        Popular fiction is made up of characters and events that are based on the connections between people, ethnic groups, and social classes. But the culture industries have the power to change what they stand for, and what they do is always at the centre of a debate about what is accepted, what sounds true, and what can be enjoyed without question. Hall thinks that these social, political, and economic battles make popular culture a battlefield, and that the years between the 1880s and the 1920s were a turning point in how people's relationships changed and how new cultural tools grew and grew.