Readers and Audiences - Popular Fiction

   Introduction - Glover David and Scott McCracken

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        In the past few years, there has been a big change in how people outside of literature studies have become interested in who reads popular fiction. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture (1985), an important book by Mike Denning, looks at working-class culture and how it relates to popular fiction. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, a book by Jonathan Rose published in 2001, shows how important it is to stop thinking of high culture and common culture as separate things with different viewers.

Women have been the majority of novel readers since the 18th century, so their reading experiences have also been looked at again. This rise in critical interest in popular fiction for women was part of the second wave of feminism, which reevaluated female writers and readers who had been ignored and looked at what women had done for literature. Popular literature doesn't really show how people live in the real world, but it does show how that experience interacts with the main social and cultural systems and ideas. People don't always agree on how to read famous romances. For example, in North America, Mills and Boon romances or Harlequin are sometimes seen as examples of women's abuse and submission, or as hiding repressed elements of resistance and payback.

Representing sexuality, like how lesbianism or homosexuality is shown, has been a very touchy subject for a long time. Queer sexualities could be explored in the most hated parts of the mass book market, where they had to fight against medical and religious discourses that tried to label them as sick. This kind of fantasy reading at the limit makes people scared and interested, which shows how much these "trashy" texts are read by people who have never met in real life.

Even though attention has grown, the experience of the reader is probably still the least known part of popular fiction. In the area of popular literature, which is becoming more globalised, fans of different genders, races, and cultures are more often the rule than the exception. For example, Latin American telenovelas are theatrical, serialised TV plays with love themes that are similar to novelas rosas, the Spanish version of anglophone formula romance.

Popular literature moves between local and global markets, and its meaning changes depending on where it is read. But not much is known about the subtle differences in how popular fiction is received in different places and times. Studying crowds and reading groups has become an important part of studying popular fiction, but there is still a lot to learn about the subtleties of how different stories are received in different places and situations.

People have said that the huge number of fan fictions that can be found on the internet is a good place to learn about how readers react. Most of the time, these have a direct connection to existing famous texts in different media canons, but they also make their own fan-on, which reinterprets and changes the original general forms in new ways. Narrative forms like blogs have also made their way back into paperbacks. This shows the connection between the private (or, more correctly, "privatised") mind of the individual reader and the public media, which is only the latest, if the most far-reaching, machinery.

In conclusion, over the past 50 years, people have become more interested in the people who read popular fiction. Studies have looked at the different experiences of readers and the role of the internet in creating popular fiction.