From Michael at 2Blowhards, the transcription of a speech by novelist Richard Wheeler. Wheeler notes that the novels “we call classics . . . were largely written for ordinary people, not educated elites” and then offers this explanation for the creation of “literary fiction” as a category:
[T]he distinction between literary and popular fiction is quite recent, three or four decades old. When I was a youth it didn’t exist. Yet today it is a given: we assume that there have always been two branches of literature, and we writers need to make one or the other our own. Where did it come from? I had no idea how it evolved until my friend Win Blevins, who has an advanced degree in criticism from Columbia University, enlightened me. The distinction between literary and popular fiction arose, he told me, about the time when colleges began to offer workshop courses in creative writing, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.
Teachers used the term “literary” to describe what was to be taught in these workshops. These seminars would teach students the art of writing a “serious” novel, and not something light or transitory or appealing to popular tastes. This distinction gradually became the norm, and in modern times “literary fiction” has become a distinct branch of literature.
Wheeler also says this, but doesn’t elaborate further:
Until recently, authors who wrote popular fiction thought it provided a better income than literary fiction. Publishers threw their publicity resources behind blockbuster and midlist novels, and the result was real rewards for the commercial novelist. But times are changing and who can say what the future will bring? I suspect that just now, most literary novelists earn more.
I wonder if that’s true, and why it is . . . are there too many pop fiction writers out there eating from the same pot? Is pop fiction a commodity, whereas literary fiction is a luxury, and so able to command higher prices?
Interesting questions . . .
Posted about this subject as well here.
Update: and here.
Thanks for the link! I’m about to go over there and read. But I thought I might throw in a few cents.
I agree that Dickens wrote for “the masses,” and so did most of the authors who are now in the Canon as classics. *However*, two things: (1) There have always been the penny dreadfuls that pandered to the ones who liked sensationalism and superficial stuff and didn’t care about the quality of the writing or whether the book would be “lasting” or not, and (2) the “masses” at that time meant the people who were literate. Remember that it has only been quite recently (using the Civilization yardstick) that MOST people in a society have been expected to be able to read and write; for many years, there were jobs that didn’t require any kind of paperwork or book-learning or what-have-you, manual labor and factory work and sweatshop stuff and being a slave (! but it’s true) and so forth, and therefore when we say Dickens wrote for the common people, we’re really talking about the Victorian middle classes and up, not about the coal miners. (Not that there weren’t any coal miners who could read, but they didn’t have leisure time, and probably only read the Bible and only on occasion.) *Now* the ease with which people can get books means that lots of people who in the past wouldn’t have had time or money to get books and read them can do so . . . I think the pop culture has changed what sells.
Wow, Shalanna, those are excellent points!!! LOL now I have to rethink my entire conception of literary v. mass fiction. RATS!!! LOL