We use many different terms when referring to texts: ‘literature’, ‘genres’, ‘fiction’, and so forth. Throughout this course, you will be reading a large number of texts of varying quality, historical importance, from various genres, and written for a variety of audiences. In doing this, you will have to tackle with one of the most enduring questions to stalk the subject of English: What exactly is ‘literature’? There are no right or wrong answers to this question, only opinions, and you will have to make your mind up for yourself. However, the following extracts and opinions from academics may help you develop your own ideas, and present you with some new ways of thinking about ‘Literature’ and ‘fiction’.

Some people take a very formal view of literature and the value that it possesses. One such academic is Ken Gelder, who draws a distinction between what he terms ‘popular fiction’ and ‘Literature’, seeing them as opposing categories that are defined differently depending on their inherent value of and the purpose for which a text is written:

[P]opular fiction is best conceived as the opposite of Literature… The reverse is also true and, in fact, it can often seem as if Literature and popular fiction exist in a constant state of mutual repudiation. By Literature, I mean the kid of writing (and let us stay with prose fiction broadly speaking) produce by, for example, Jane Austin, George Elliot, Henry James, James Joyce, William Faulkner…DH Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Tobias Wolff, and so on. The work of some of these writers has certainly been popular… Nevertheless…none of these writers has actually produced popular fiction and nor would they wish anyone to imagine they had. They identify, and are rightly identified in turn, as authors of Literature… Literature deploys a set of logics and practices that are different in kind to those deployed in the field of popular fiction.

[Popular fiction] values conventions over originality. And of course, usually (but not always) it is positioned in…‘the field of large-scale production’ – with a potentially immediate, broad-based distribution. … Literature draws upon the language of the art world [and] ties its authors to notions of creativity. Literature is cerebral [i.e. it makes you think], but popular fiction is sensuous: caught up with ‘danger’ and ‘intrigue’.

From the point of view of Literature…popular fiction would seem to lack certain qualities: it isn’t complex enough, it isn’t restrained enough, it doesn’t have literature’s ‘intense formal artistry’, its ‘tangled plots’ and so on.

[Popular fiction’s role is] as ‘entertainment’, its self-identification as a form of industrial production or ‘manufacture’, and its commercial and merchandizing potential. … [T]he reader of Literature is contemplative, while the consumer of popular fiction is ‘distracted’.

For some people ‘literature’ refers to those texts which are commonly studied in schools and universities. Some say that books become ‘literary’ because teachers, lecturers, professors and academics make them so. They move from being mere ‘fiction’ to ‘Literature’ because people say that have some special value, whether this comes from their content of the manner in which they are written.

But times are changing, and the distinction between the ‘popular’ and the ‘literary’ is becoming more and more blurred. Simon Ryan takes a very broad view of literature, removing the distinction between the ‘artistic’ and the ‘popular’:

Does it really matter what ‘literature’ is?  Does everyone have to agree?  Because there is no hard and fast definition of literature, perhaps it is more beneficial to seek an analysis instead.  What purposes does literature serve?  What distinguishes literature from non-literary works?  What makes us treat something as literature?  How do we know when something is literature?  Would it be easier to ask ‘what isn’t literature’? 

Literature is as literature does.  In exploring ideas about what literature is, it is useful to look at some of the things that literature does.  Literature is something that reflects society, makes us think about ourselves and our society, allows us to enjoy language and beauty, it can be didactic, and it reflects on ‘the human condition’.  It both reflects ideology and changes ideology, just like it follows generic conventions as well as changing them.  It has social and political effects… Literature is the creation of another world, a world that we can only see through reading literature.

Often we speak of ‘genre’ fiction as being something separate from proper ‘Literature’. But what exactly is a ‘genre’? Jerry Palmer provides the following definition and explanation, with an emphasis on how genres allow us – the audience – to bring with us certain expectations and understandings based upon exposure to other similar stories, which in turn allow us to approach and enjoy the text in a specific way:

‘Genre’ is a French term commonly used to indicate that texts can be sorted into groups which have common characteristics. For much of [the twentieth] century this notion has been unfashionable in literary criticism, whose overwhelming focus has been the individual text and the reader’s response to it. However, in film studies and the analysis of popular literature it has never been discarded, for here the relevance of membership of a group is obvious: to say that The Godfather is a gangster film, or that Agatha Christie writes detective stories, is not a travesty of the texts in questions, and it tell us something significant (if obvious) about them…

[I]f a group of texts has something important in common, them grouping them allows significant generalisations…

[G]enre is an element in the ‘horizon of expectations’ that an audience will have as it follows the story…For example, if we recognise an event as belonging to the category ‘funeral’, ‘wedding’ or ‘religious ceremony’, we understand others’ dress, postures, behaviour, speech, etc., within the framework of this event…We recognise the difference between a prayer, a letter, a novel, a news broadcast, and so on, and we know that reactions are appropriate in one instance and not in another: no one says ‘amen’ at the end of the news, or flees into the countryside [after seeing] a horror film… This labelling [i.e. identifying a text by its genre] cues the ‘horizon of expectations’ the audience brings to the story.

Even a seemingly unproblematic term like ‘fiction’ can be difficult to pin down. At what point do we draw the distinction between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’? Is it useful to limit the term ‘fiction’ to novels, or can we take a broader view to include other forms of writing: poetry, scripts, and so forth. What about novels which are written in a very poetic manner, or in the form of something other than a traditional novel, such as a letter, diary, or comic? Here is one opinion on how we can define ‘fiction’, presented by Klaus Hempfer, but again there will be many opinions, and none of them necessarily ‘correct’:

The problems concerning the concept of fiction start with the fact that the term “fiction” has been applied to a considerable variety of phenomena at different times and in different places. … In the English-speaking world, the term “fiction,” when used to denote a type of text, often relates only to narrative fictional texts. … According to [Jonothan] Culler “fiction” is an umbrella term denoting “imaginative prose narratives […] as opposed to poetry, on the one hand, which will not be found in the fiction section, nor on the fiction bestseller list, and to non-fiction on the other”.

We need to be careful when talking about these terms that we know ourselves what we mean, and that we make it clear to others what meaning we intend if there is the potential for discrepancy. Generally speaking, in this course we will be looking at the concept of ‘literature’ from a very broad perspective. We are not only concerned with the classics or traditionally ‘literary’ novels: we will be looking at how stories are crafted by a variety of authors who have appealed to a variety of audiences. Just because a novel is written for a child does not mean it lacks meaning, nor does a novel making the bestseller list remove its value as a piece of writing, and nor does the fact that a novel is not the most eloquent or finely-crafted piece of writing mean that it cannot lead us to a deeper understanding of our world, or a greater awareness of the nature of writing. Similarly, while the term ‘fiction’ could be confined to books, we will again be taking a broader view, looking not just at the format, but at a variety of stories, including poetry, which carry a narrative and include characters, plot and setting.

By the end of this course will need to come to your own conclusion about how you will think of and define ‘literature’, and what value you will place upon such distinctions. This is not an easy task, and whatever you decide will likely change, be forgotten, and reformulated again as your experiences and perceptions transform. Allow your perceptions to evolve as you continue to explore different types of texts, different genres, and different styles of writing, and consider how you can apply these ideas and techniques to your own responses. Open your minds, and witness the multitudinous varieties of life that can be found in literature.

Consider the following questions:

• How do you define ‘literature’?
• How do you decide upon the ‘value’ of a text? Can such a thing be done?
• Do we need to make a distinction between the ‘popular’ and the ‘literary’?
• Why do genres exist, and what purposes do they serve?

A question of genre:

• How many genres can you think of?
• What conventions come to your mind when you think of each genre?
• Are genres always distinct and static? Or do they overlap and change? Come up with some examples of stories you know which either fall entirely within one genre, or are a mix of several genres.
• Is it possible to challenge a genre, to change its conventions? Can you think of any texts which have done this successfully?