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1. Popular Literature
Concept, Issues, and Challenges

2. Popular Literature
● Popular literature includes those writings intended for the masses and those that find
favour with large audiences.
● It can be distinguished from artistic literature because it is designed primarily to
entertain.
● The growth of popular literature has paralleled the spread of literacy through
education and has been facilitated by technological developments in printing.
● Popular literature, unlike high literature, generally does not seek a high degree of
formal beauty or subtlety and is not intended to endure.

3. Characteristics of Popular Literature
● Driven by plot and characters are stock figures who serve the plot.
● Plain language which close to common language. Dialogues seem
like everyday spoken language.
● Fewer obscure symbols and allegories are used. Symbols used are
clear and can be easily comprehended by the readers.

4. Characteristics of Popular Literature
● They can be tied into current trends and concerns. It does not deal
with abstract problems.
● Popular literature appeals to masses.
● Primarily entertaining.
● It does not demand a scholarly, intellectual response from the
readers.
● Readers include all age groups.

5. Start of Popular Literature
● The formal, publishingcategory of "Popular Fiction"beginsin the 19th Century - a time
whenwiderliteracy and cheaperprintingmake books availableto middle-and-lower-
classreaders.
● Stories which engage the attention of many people over time have always existed and
continue to inspire popular literature. We have always been fascinated with Romances,
with Adventures, with Ghosts and Monsters and Crimes.
● However, once the "book" became a part of entertainment options for the masses,
though, we had a flowering of new stories and themes.

6. Modern Popular Literature
● Popular literature today is producedeither to be read by a literate audience or
to be enacted ontelevision or in the cinema.
● Popular fiction and drama, westerns and detective stories, films and
televisionserials, all deal with the same great archetypal themes or in which
it followssimilar pattern- which simply the limitswithin whichthe human
mindworks.

7. Vitality of Popular Literature
● While"Popular Literature" was published and widelyread in the 19th
Century, by the 20th Century it had become a worldunto itself.
● During the 20th Century, the growth of readership and genres in "Popular
Literature" made "Literary" Literature seems like a small and exclusive
"academic and scholarly" market. The ratio of sales told it all: Popular
Literature comprisedalmost 90 % of the market for fiction.

8. Themes
● The most important genre in popular literature is and always has been the romance,
extending as it does from the Middle Ages to the present. The most common type of
romance describes the obstacles encountered by two people (usually young) engaged in a
forbidden love.
● Another common genre is that of fantasy, or science fiction. Novels set in the western
frontier of the United States in the 19th century, and called westerns, are also popular.
● Finally, the detective story or murder mystery is a widely read form of popular literature.
● Popular literature has also come to include such genres as comic books and cartoon strips.

9. Issues and Challenges of Popular Literature
● The aesthetic theory of modernism not only respectswriter’s choice of theme,
technique and style.
● It can be claimed that modernism is largelydemocratic; it is against all kinds of
discrimination. But the realityis, it discriminates.
● Popular literatureis not at odds with the fact that its popularity is ephemeraland
fleeting.

10. Issues and Challenges of Popular Literature
● Popular authors incline to familiar,cliché riddenand easilydigestible language.
● Popular literatureseems readyto sacrifice artistic valuesat the cost of popularity.
● We must admit that readersof popularliterature don’tmindwell-conceived
opinionsofliterarycritics. They keep readingwhat they find interesting,
entertaining, quenching their represseddesires and close to their heart. They are
basically pleasure-seekersandsolace-finders.

11. T H A N K Y O U !!