Popular Literature

  Popular Fiction: A Short Introduction Dr. Arshad Ahammad A.   In the assessment of literary reading tastes, the elementary question that may be raised is "Who is one’s favourite author?" Have you ever wondered what is the contradiction in not including Sidney Sheldon, Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, or James Patterson along with names like Charles Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Orhan Pamuk or Khaled Hosseini while answering this question? This contradiction leads us to the nuances of the conflicts between literary fiction and genre fiction, or more generally, mainstream literature and popular literature, for the former group of authors belong to the tradition of genre fiction and the latter’s works represent literary fiction. Popular fiction embraces around 70 percent of the market for fiction worldwide and this proves the ‘popularity’ of this genre. Popular fiction is often regarded as comprising those books that everyone reads. Popular literature is disti...

  What is Cultural Studies? Dr. Meena T.Pillai Just as it is difficult to describe what culture is, it is difficult to describe what Cultural Studies is. Raymond Williams argued that culture is ordinary. However, how we read culture and make sense of its everyday practices is a political exercise. For example, if someone says, culture is not ordinary and that it can only be ‘higher’ forms of art and learning, it reveals a certain kind of ideology. But then what is ideology? It is the process by which ideas, beliefs and practices are based on power and reflect the interests of the dominant, while passing themselves off as natural and common-sensical. Thus, the cultural belief that men are the custodians of women reflect a patriarchal ideology. Cultural Studies looks at the nexus between knowledge and power, trying to analyze its ideological biases. In fact, Cultural Studies does not claim to be a discipline at all; instead, it reaches across the boundaries of various academic ...