ABSTRACT

It is common to mark a distinction between popular fiction and literary fiction or, as it is sometimes called, “serious literature”. (Two clarifications: Serious literature may include work that is not fictional, but I shall ignore this complication for the remainder of the essay. And although the category of fiction includes works in a wide variety of media and forms, I shall, unless otherwise indicated, use the term to refer to prose fiction only.) Dan Brown, E.L. James, Suzanne Collins, and James Patterson are paradigmatic producers of the former while Jane Austen, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Virginia Woolf are well-known creators of the latter. Given such exemplars, it must seem the distinction picks out a real and important difference between two categories of writing.