The concept of 'popular fictions', however, should
not be seen as some kind of marriage broker, disappearing tactfully
once Literature and History have met. Reading the essays in this book
requires, as writing them must have done, a juggler's
skill in keeping all three notions in play. Of the three, however,
'Literature' causes the most anxiety: squeezing it between
'popular fictions' and History calls into proper question the stability
of that central and too-long dominant term. Just as
deciding to call some fictions 'popular' raises the question of how
and why other literature is more valued, so putting History
last reinforces that evaluative process. But a recognition that canon
of Literature is a historical construct should not simply lead to a partisan
regrouping of past champions and new contenders; rather it should produce
a sceptical analysis of what is invested in such hierarchies. The history
of literature discernible in this book is, in fact, part of a continuous
rewriting of the relations between the artificial categories of Genre,
Canon and Tradition. These categories are, however, still held within what
the authors of one recent New Accents book, Rewriting English,
call the 'strong magnetic field' of literature. (1)
And it is worth staying within that field a little longer if only to resist
that traditional treatment of 'popular fictions' which values them solely
for their social content. Just as canonic texts receive intensive formalistic
reading, so popular fictiolur should be treated in a way which does not
merely allow 'non-canonised texts [to be] collapsed back into the conditions
of production from which they derive'. (2) Popular fictions,
then, need to be read and analysed not as some kind of sugar-coated sociology,
but as narratives which negotiate, no less than the classic texts, the
connection between 'writing, history and ideology'.
That last phrase can be found printed on the inside
cover of more recent issues of Literature and History, and
it represents a definite shift in the concerns of the journal since its
inception. But equally, retaining Literature as part of our title
also has a strategic importance, both for the journal and for this book.
Literature is not a designer label intended to dignify the everyday
denim of popular fiction, but a reminder that such works receive very
'close reading' from those who buy or borrow them. So, for example, the
readers of novels published by Mills & Boon or Silhouette not only
value the individual style and themes of
their 'favourite authors', but report their findings back to the companies'
monitoring service. Thus, if the essays collected
here concentrate on the formal structures of the written text rather
than the social structures in which those texts are produced and read,
then at least they resist patronizing generalizations about the reading
habits of those (unlike ourselves) who live and read outside the academy.
When we came to make the selection of essays for inclusion in this book
we lighted fairly quickly upon about twenty real
possibilities out of the 120 or so articles that had appeared in Literature
and History since 1975. Those twenty essays included discussion
of texts as diverse as Frankenstein, The Beggar's Opera,
Pickwick Papers and Ginx's Baby. What made these (and not
others) appropriate for a book on popular fictions was that the texts they
dealt with were, by and large, all widely read, seen or sold; and this
fact itself opens up questions of literary and historical placing which
cut off the retreat into the immobility of standard literary criticism.
The point of this book, however, is not rigidly to re(de)fine once more
the term 'popular fiction', but to see what happens when proven best-selling
fictions are placed within the dialectic of Literature-and-His- tory.
However, to go back for a moment to the inception
of the journal in 1975: we had then no clear-cut, neatly worked-out or
theorized notion of what that dialectic was or might be. But we did
have certain starting points, and they remain important
starting points for this book. We recognized that works of literature
were historically located, and that within what was
called History (i.e. what was studied as History in schools and higher
education) literature as a form of consciousness probably
deserved much greater prominence. We subscribed, then, to the hardly
earth-shattering view that literature was produced and
consumed in a material world which was itself shaped by a complex mix
of economic, political, social, cultural and intellectual forces; we wished,
in other words, to stress the concrete materiality of literature. But we
wished to do this by not then arguing that literature was a mere reflection
of the historical forces shaping society. Literature, as we saw it, was
part and parcel of how societies are formed and changed; it had, for us
at least, some dynamic of its own. Or, to put it another way round, history
needed literature not as some kind of creative affirmation of what we already
knew, but as an active and integral part of reaching an understanding of
past societies and their relation to the present.
This then, represented, and represents, a point
of departure. It is no more than that because, once confronted, the
problems
proliferate. But there is one vital difference between 1975 and 1986,
and this book bears testimony to it: many of these problems have at least
been engaged. One that has become important to us is why, as we have already
implied, one piece of literature is seen as 'great' whilst others are assigned
the labels . . . 'minor', 'popular', or are indeed considered so
inferior as to be not worth mentioning at all. On its own, the question
'What makes novel X better than novel Y?' represents no challenge to traditional
literary criticism. Indeed, the theoretical assumptions and methodology
of that criticism are designed precisely to ask, and resolve, such a question.
But once shift the theoretical foundation that underpins the 'major'/'minor'
distinction and not only does a whole new range of literature become available
to us, but new ways of looking at the relationship between literature and
society also emerge. For example, they allow us to explore a specific definition
of a 'popular fiction' we have already touched on: one that presupposes
a large readership or audience forit in ifs own day. To take an example
from this book: once Edward Jenlrins's Ginx's Baby does not need
to be judged on a scale of 'literary greatness', then some interesting
questions about Jenkins's contemporary popularity begin to be taken seriously.
The problem that this in its turn poses is: how do we relate Jenkins's
work to his society; how do we read it historically?
Once the procedures of conventional literary criticism have shown to be problematical, they clearly cannot be defended in an innocent or unselfconscious way. Meaning in such works has to be found by reference to other criteria. This is not to say that literary critical skills prove totally inappropriate. The question of how to 'read' such works must involve detailed attendance to the written text as well as to the wider society and discourses within which it is located. But the essays in this book may indicate that when we address best-selling authors, these skills have to be combined with a variety of strategies in which 'the literary' can be made to meet 'history' and vice versa in order to search out meaning. The essays on Mrs Oliphant, Edward Jenkins, Geoffrey Household, Daphne du Maurier and Philip Gibbs, for example, all dismiss the 'history-as-context- for-the-study-of-fiction ' approach, and seek instead to weave together the text, the genre and the specific history of the period. And all these essays create specifically different 'histories' in order to answer the question why those books were a popular 'good read' in their own day.
Two things stand out here. The first is the difficulty
that some (though not all) of these popular fictions present to the modern
reader. They are not easy reading. But then not many present-day readers
can escape into an effortless reading of George
Eliot or Henry James. The equivalent difficulty, say, of late nineteenth-century
'popular' texts results from historical changes in language and narrative
form rather than from a confirmation of any elitist distinction between
'ephemera' and 'classics'. The second point is that the histories of 'popular
fictions' have to be constructed; that is, their histories cannot be taken
from standard secondary works on the history of their period. Hence not
only are those works rediscovered and examined, but in the process the
history of the period is itself reappraised. The reason for this is obvious:
if a piece of popular fiction is both difficult to read and not subject
to the conventional criteria of 'literary merit', then how to read its
'meanings' has to be extracted more deliberately from the ideological,
social and political matrix that encloses and, in large measure, produces
it. We are not saying, however, that the history comes first and the text
is then applied to that history; rather that the text itself forms part
of that history--part, in other words, of the attempt to understand forms
of consciousness and the articulation of ideas in a past society.
Michael Denning's essay on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, while
also introducing popular theatre into the book, illustrates this point.
It is not simply that the contemporary meaning of The Beggar's
Opera has to be sought within the specific history of the period, but
that Gay's work constitutes a dynamic part of that history, helping both
to articulate the tensions and contradictions within society and, in giving
them popular expression, to heighten their significance as part of contemporary
con-
sciousness. To write about popular fictions is to write history.
Indeed, to write about any kind of literature should
lead to the crucial recognition that it is inevitably implicated in the
process of history. So, to write about 'Literature' is also to write
history. But popular fictions are not some trivial exhibit waiting
to be discovered and mined by historians whose respect for 'great literature'
persuades them that they should leave the task
of re-reading the traditional texts to their literary colleagues: they,
too, have specific formal structures which need equally
careful analysis. Only when we reject the notion of 'popular fiction'
as topical content and 'literature' as timeless form can
we begin properly to interpret its historical significance. That is
why it is important to avoid a dismissive critical condescension
in the use of terms like 'formula' and 'stereotype'. If the twelve
romance novels written by Charlotte Lamb in 1985 follow a
familiar narrative formula, then part of their familiarity comes from
their conscious inheritance of narrative structures found in
Emily or Charlotte Bronte. This is not a question of one 'unique' original
being converted into the facsimiles of mass production:
there are eccentric best-sellers and formulaic classics. The readers
of Charlotte Lamb do indeed have a comforting idea of
how her novels will end; but there are not many surprises, either,
in the final pages of Jane Austen.
But the arbitrary distinction between popular fiction
and literature is even more problematical. Why, for example, are
some pieces of fiction which were popular in their own day still apparently
popular in the late twentieth century? Why are some
popular fictions also rated as 'great literature'? The answers
provided by the essays in this book point us in some interesting
directions. First, we need to recognize that a piece of fiction is
produced not just once, but time and again for each succeeding
generation, and that it is 'read' differently by different generations,
each making its own sense of the text for its own purposes.
Second, these texts are constantly re-produced in other ways: turned
into films, TV plays, radio dramas and so on. A work of
popular fiction can then literally take on a multitude of forms, be
given a multitude of historically specific 'meanings', and thus
become one work of many popular fictions. Hence, as the essay on the
1944 film version of Shakespeare's Henry V shows, what is already
constituted as part of England's 'great literary tradition' can be used
quite consciously as part of a patriotic,
morale-boosting, war effort; thereby re-creating Shakespeare as popular
fiction, while at the same time allowing audiences of the day to see that
their national identity ('Englishness') is something shaped by, and understood
through, the work of a literary
titan like Shakespeare.
What the film of Henry V also suggests is
the extent to which conscious efforts are constantly made to popularize
'great literature'. In the second half of the twentieth century, by such
devices as the 'classic serial', television has further enhanced
this popularization. In one sense, therefore, the 'great tradition'
has been strengthened by means of turning novels and plays
into modern 'popular fictions'. But equally, as the activities of the
Virago publishing house show, the notion of an exclusive
canon can be subverted by simply calling every novel published a 'modern
classic'. This may be merely a canny publisher's decision to promote a
new evaluation of work previously ignored or unsold, but anti-hierarchical
effects are equally achieved by less direct political mechanisms. The BBC
Drama Department has a continuing investment in the national icon of Charles
Dickens, so that an adaptation of, say, Bleak House can be used
to prove that the BBC still brings 'culture to the masses'; that it can
do so 'artistically'; and that it can also make 'culture' a commercial
success. Yet it takes the BBC a full-page advertisement in the 'quality'
national press to construct an arbitrary tradition in which Tender is
the Night becomes the natural sequel to Dennis Potter's re-creation
of the Jazz Age in Pennies from Heaven.
Similarly, for every popularization of an 'A-level'
certified classic, there is the reverse process whereby a steady middle-
brow fiction such as Paul Scott's Raj trilogy is converted into
a classic to be adorned by the Dames of the British stage and sold to Mobil's
Masterpiece Theatre. And here Granada proves its own fitness to make great
literature speak to each age and
generation. The fact that this literature does so 'speak', of course,
largely depends on the way in which it is made to speak to
its audience, on the way it is given 'relevance' and modern popular
appeal. These notions of relevance and popularity can appear to be arbitrary.
Why decide, for example, that 1983 should be the 'Year of India'? The explanation
must be that such a decision is bound up inextricably with perceptions
of proven public taste--the success, for instance, of Attenborough's Gandhi
two years earlier--so that in 1983 India comes to be represented on our
screens by Paul Scott, E.M. Forster and M.M. Kaye, author of The Far
Pavilions. In the end, though, what television and film have done is
to create a fusion of 'great' and 'minor' literature very much within the
realm of 'the popular'. Despite this process, perhaps ironically, 'great
literature' does not lose out. Its status seems, on the contrary, to be
enhanced. Indeed, we might suggest that the very survival of that ideological
concept 'the great tradition' depends as much upon its artefacts being
transformed into contemporary popular entertainment, as upon their appearance
on A-level and degree syllabuses.
A play's or novel's popularity can, therefore, be
re-created time and again. But the creation of that popularity involves
aiming a fiction at a specific audience--or market. The musical version
of Oliver Twist, first as theatre then as film, does not seek exactly
the same audience as the BBC TV serialization. The success of one may help
to increase the popular audience for the other, but in no sense are popular
fictions directed towards, or consumed by, an undifferentiated mass audience.
Clearly we need to know more about its composition, and Kate Flint's essay
recognizes the importance of the nature of the audience in
accounting for the success of popular fictions. (3)
But despite such honourable exceptions, this is one area with which Literature
and History has not been able to deal. What does emerge in many of
the essays collected here, however, is that popular fictions are made not
simply by audience response, but, more importantly, by the determined efforts
of some authors, film-makers and publishers: some, that is to say, who
so consciously gear their books, films or plays to what they believe or
know to be popular, who have such a heightened sense of market, demand
and 'taste', that they must know what they are 'creating' is, in fact,
a product. Most fiction is of course a product in the sense that it is
written or made to be sold and marketed, but one characteristic of 'popular'
fiction must be that its relationship to the market, its place in the socio-economic
relations of production, is different from that of 'non-popular' fiction.
Two essays deal with this issue, though in significantly
different ways. Kathy MacDermott points to the early eighteenth-century
relationship between writing and the market as a key moment in the creation
of the concept 'literature',
and thus to the imminent dichotomy between 'high culture' and 'low
culture'. Norman Feltes highlights the way in which
Dickens, who is now considered to have written 'serious' fiction, was
consciously involved, not simply in writing a best-seller,
but in producing a commodity. What these two essays jointly challenge
is the myth that 'great literature' is produced by those
whose creative genius drives them unerringly on, and 'popular fictions'
by those whose only real concern is market demand.
Deliberately conceived popular fictions may, indeed, be seen by their
producers first and foremost as commodities; but the
relationship between all fictions and the market--its nature and composition,
and how the commodity is produced for it--must be a crucial consideration
in any full discussion of literature, popular or otherwise.
This leads on to another set of questions neatly
highlighted by Paul O'Flinn's essay on Frankenstein. (4)
It illustrates, first, an earlier point: that popular fiction is continuously
reproduced, until, in the case of Frankenstein, one text has become
a multitude of popular fictions. Second, it asks why and how some popular
fictions stay 'popular' from one generation to the next (Dracula
and Sherlock Holmes spring to mind here, as well as Frankenstein),
other than by their elevation to canonic literature. Third, it asks how
far the re-creation of popular fictions involves their transmission more
widely within people's everyday lives--as O'Flinn says: 'Versions of the
monster glare out from chewing-gum wrappers and crisp bags ... [while]
in the USA he forged a chain of restaurants.' Frankenstein forces
us to recognize, therefore, that some popular fictions have virtually nothing
to do with their authorial text. What do the scores of Frankenstein films
in the twentieth century have to do with Mary Shelley's original? Indeed,
is her text, apart from supplying a name and a basic idea, at all relevant
to an investigation of the 'Frankenstein' phenomenon in twentieth-century
mass entertainment? Feminist critics such as Ellen Moers may have
established Mary Shelley's creation of an enduring myth for a widely varied
audience, but there is a vast gulf between a writer's--or
director's--knowledge and use of an original source and an audience's
perception of something called 'Frankenstein'. This
is not to make an elitist distinction between intellectual respect
for, and popular indifference to, the 'original text' (after all, Mrs.
Gaskell was capable of the now hackneyed confusion between monster
and creator). But while an audience may have to have
some kind of recognition of Shakespeare as England's 'greatest poet'
to be attracted to the film of Henry V, no such knowledge of Mary
Shelley attracts audiences to the latest Frankenstein film. It is
not Mary Shelley that matters, but a consciousness of
numerous previous films. The question thus becomes: how is this Frankenstein
kept alive as a popular piece of modern fiction? And much the same might
be asked of Dracula or Sherlock Holmes. What we must note is that
a complex set of ideas and
expectations surround a name, and so enable some variation on the theme
to be constantly reproduced--even, in the case of
Sherlock Holmes, to the point where a television company can make a
series 'based on' the original Conan Doyle stories. But
such a series is only possible, in effect, because of a whole legacy
of previous fictionalizations of 'Holmes' which have little to do with
the original.
With some popular fictions, then, it is possible
to work and rework a particular motif within a given set of audience expecta-
tions, so that, in the case of film, people can 'know' what they are
seeing before they have seen it, or, with format books such as Mills &
Boon romances, to 'know' what they are going to read before they have read
them. But that knowledge comes from practised viewing and reading which,
in themselves, contribute to the successful formula: Hollywood films are
pre-viewed and
re-edited until they coincide with 'the audience's' expectations; Mills
& Boon elaborately test their readers' responses to varia-
tions in the traditional ingredients of their romances. Such an emphasis
on the complicated reciprocal relation between con-
sumer and produce may seem to come uncomfortably close to praising
the democracy of the market, but we need to take that
risk if we are to avoid a functionalist sociology which insists upon
mechanically reading off ideological effects from the formulae ossified
in a 'lesser tradition' of popular fiction. 'Formula' and 'genre' are important
to the study of popular fiction, but not because these notions serve to
distinguish it from 'Literature', rather because they draw attention to
the ways in which readers go about their reading. As Janice Radway has
established in Reading the Romance, there is a real gain in moving
our attention from the solitary text 'taken in isolation, to the complex
social event of reading'. (5) But the present essays
are written in the main by academics trained in the formal close reading
of texts rather than in the ethnographic skills which inform Reading
the Romance. Literature and History, predictably, has not received
many investigations into what can be called the sociologies of taste or
pleasure. This does not mean that the readings published in the journal
merely celebrate the arcane textual mysteries of 'popular' discourses.
It is because many works of popular fiction are seemingly 'easy to read'
that so much interesting work can be done in tracing the historical processes
of reproduction and revaluation. A best-seller can provide an enjoyably
slick surface from which we can skid away from the fixities of literary
typology to the freedom of historical and cultural change.
And yet the cry may still go up that what distinguishes 'Literature' from popular fiction is that 'great art' stimulates and enhances our imagination, our understanding, our intellect, whereas most popular fictions subdue, deaden or deny them. So, the argument might run, the intellectual challenge of reading Richardson's Pamela proves far more demanding, and therefore rewarding, than that involved in reading Jackie Collins's The Bitch. But for many people in the late twentieth century Pamela is scarcely readable, while The Bitch presents an 'easy read'. Is this, then, still to say that, having acquired the status of 'great art', Pamela speaks now more meaningfully than The Bitch? What we want to deny is the factitious distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture, the boundary between them being so frayed by constant movement that its only use now is to mark the ideological motives of those who insist that it still provides a necessary function. Those who read or scrutinize Dickens as a novelist secure within the canon (if not 'the great tradition'), and ignore his simultaneous appearance on TV at Sunday tea-time, are substituting a previously freeze-dried version of the past for the dynamics of historical process. A properly historical reading of Dickens, or any other writer, has to recognize these seismic shifts--movements which make any Richter-like measurement of 'popular' and 'classic' fiction futile or partisan.
If we need any further proof, we can simply turn to the essay on Angela
Carter. Patricia Duncker discusses Carter's very
particular use of that most popular genre, the fairy story; and, of
course, Carter's work has already been turned into film. But,
intriguingly, the back cover of the King Penguin edition of Carter's
The Bloody Chamber promotes the book in this way: 'In
tales that glitter and haunt--strange nuggets from a writer whose wayward
pen spills forth stylish, erotic, nightmarish jewels of prose--the old
fairy stories live and breathe again'; and goes on to quote Robert Coover's
opinion that it is 'a classic of short fiction, literally aglow with lyrical
intensity, comic ingenuity'. Indeed, this promotion neatly sums up the
dilemma: how do you market a contemporary writer like Angela Carter?
Of what literary tradition should she be made a member? The blurb
touches both the potentially 'classic' nature of her writing, as well as
the potentially 'popular'--the erotically gothic. But it is not just
Penguin's dilemma; it is ours too. Can we locate her writing within 'popular
fiction', and how does it affect our definitions of that term if we do?
One thing is clear: Carter's work refuses any inclination we may have to
measure and define popular fictions over against 'serious' literature.
If we once deny any such discriminations, then all writing, theatre or
film-making has to be understood and studied in a different set of terms.
And if these terms contain the notions of the author's sense of his or
her 'market', of audience and audience expectations, of writing/film/theatre
as product or commodity, and of the specific historical location of that
product, then we may have a better chance of understanding the place of
the cultural within the social formation and, within that, what we might
mean by 'popular fictions'. In the end, however, the ultimate issue is
not a better understanding of the 'popular fictions' themselves, but what
they tell us of the constitution of culture--in particular popular
culture--and of cultural politics.
Finally, it is also important to recognize that the
cultural politics and theory which inform the essays collected here have
their own history. All appeared as articles in Literature
and History some time between 1979 and 1984, and they are marked by
the particular history of political and intellectual debate that pervaded
the 1970s and early 1980s. One significant effect of this on the journal's
editors was our recognition that it was not enough passively to reflect
the current arguments. We concluded that we should actively encourage contributions
to the debate. So these essays did not appear in the journal by accident,
and
neither is it a coincidence that the earliest date of publication of
any of them was 1979.
In 1979 Literature and History became more explicitly interested in theory than it had been previously. It was, ironically perhaps, a strange moment for this to happen, and the strangeness of the moment affected the character of the journal's theoretical offerings. 1978 had seen the publication of E. P. Thompson's The Poverty of Theory, his call to History to act as the last bastion of defence against Theory: a Theory that had (only on the left, of course) already greatly influenced literary studies. The following year saw the issues raised by The Poverty of Theory turned into a moment, a very theatrical moment, of high drama. At the Ruskin College History Workshop that autumn, in the packed arena of a disused church, to the delight of many and the embarrassment of some, Edward Thompson again attacked theory. The politics of this are significant. Addressed as it was to cheering (socialist) historians, the attack encouraged them not simply to be wary of theory, but to deny it an important place in historical studies. Moreover, there was nothing fortuitous in the fact that the person attacked that night was Richard Johnson of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, himself a historian. There was, it seemed to some of us, a markedly reactionary tenor to the whole performance. The Centre had done a great deal in the 1970s to stress the importance of theory, but by the late 1970s it, and Richard Johnson in his own work, had already begun to explore new ways of applying the 1970s 'moment of Theory' to intellectual debate and academic research. (6) By 1979 'Theory', as an autonomous and abstruse field of study (a latter-day scholasticism?), was already giving ground to new forms of empirical work. What the debates of the 1970s had taught us was that such work could not return to an innocent empiricism: an empiricism which, in literary studies for example, simply centred on 'the text itself', or even 'the text in its social context'. We needed to utilize theory, but to take it beyond its self-referential exclusiveness and its resistance to direct engagement with material problems. What we learned, however, from that dramatic moment at Ruskin College was that this intellectual and political shift in the use of theory would be easier to achieve in literary studies than in history, since an influential group of socialist historians seemed to be refusing history any part (except outright resistance) in the debate about the uses of theory. In addition, there was a larger context in which this 'moment' occurred: the impact of Thatcherism on left politics, plus the urgent need to understand the popularity of such a destructive political regime and to discover how the left could counter it. Literature and History, then, as a 'radical' journal was set a problem: how to respond both to the debate about 'Theory' and to developments in national politics?
What we have called 'the moment of Theory' in the
1970s had been, for the most part, a peculiarly introverted left political
affair. But if this theory was to be utilized, it had to engage with
the existing loci and practices of most literary and historical
studies. It had to recognize that they occur, by and large, in the
classroom; that these disciplines have an institutional form; and
that within the institutions of education radical notions of what constitutes
'literature' and 'history' are in conflict with the
traditional constitution of these subjects. The 'Literature Teaching
politics' network had been addressing this problem since 1979, but
it was also one that Literature and History could not ignore. Indeed,
since 1979 the journal has tried to marry theory to the more immediate
demands of teaching literature and history in higher education.
We recognized, in other words, that there was little point in theoretically
deconstructing the status of, say, Jane Austen, when Jane Austen continued
to be required reading on the curriculum of most, if not all, English degrees.
But that by no means implied that we thought theory was pointless. Rather
it meant that Literature and History had to find, first, theoretically-informed
articles on established texts and authors and, second, articles which shifted
the debate from canonic texts and authors towards other forms of writing,
Hence
our special interest in 'popular fictions'. For what that interest
signals is not an appropriation of the latest intellectual fad, but
a way of re-thinking--and of teaching - Literature-and-History.
What this book should demonstrate, therefore, is
that the study of popular fictions help to reformulate conceptions of
'Literature' and of literary criticism. Certainly, it represents something
of what Literature and History has been trying to
achieve, at least since 1979: a way of forging the relationship between
'writing, history and ideology'. These essays display
theoretical work which is--no longer paradoxically--preoccupied with
particular texts, authors or genres, and materially
specific issues such as the processes of production and reproduction.
And yet, as the inclusion of Tony Bennett's essay shows, this in no way
denies the validity of work concerned to define 'popular fictions' in more
general theoretical terms. All the essays argue that to continue to teach
'Literature' as if it comprises only the 'great texts' is to play Hamlet
without the prince (or even Dracula without the Count). The study
of popular fictions calls History back on to the stage as a crucial
participant in reformulating a relationship between fictional production
and society. This book, then, represents a contribution to an intellectual
debate and to a political struggle, because it aims to place popular fictions,
as a dynamic element of the socio-cultural formation, on the curriculum.
It aims to legitimize the critical study of all forms of writing.
And it aims to make
Literature without History, and History without Literature, intellectually
and educationally unthinkable.
Notes
(1) Janet Batsleer, TonyDavies, Rebecca O'Rourke and Chris Weedon, Rewriting English (Methuen, London 1985), p. 2.
(2) Tony Bennett, 'Marxism and popular fiction', Literature and History, vol. 7:2 (Autumn 1981), p. 151. An edited version of this essay appears in this book.
(3) See also on this topic the important essay by Darko Suvin,'The social addressees of Victorian fiction', Literature and History, vol. 8:1 (Spring 1982).
(4) Paul O'Flinn, 'Production and reproduction: the case of Frankenstein', Literature and History, vol. 9:2 (Autumn 1983), pp. 200-1. An edited version of this essay appears later in this book.
(5) Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1984), p. 8.
(6) See, for example, Richard Johnson's essays
in John Clarke, Chas Critchcr and Richard Johnson (eds), Working Class
Culture: Studies in History and Theory (Hutchinson, London 1979).