Popularity

Susan Bassnett shows in this chapter how the study of world literature has traditionally been dominated by a focus on ‘great’ authors, on the one hand, and avant-garde writers, on the other. Missing from this research programme is a corresponding emphasis on popular literature, and thus on those authors, such as Jack London or J. K. Rowling, who are actually read by massive amounts of people. The trouble with such an approach is that it blatantly disregards many of the most exciting dynamics by which authors reinvent the world. The chapter makes the case that, in thinking about those writers whose work becomes global, we need to broaden our horizon beyond the texts studied in schools and universities so as to take more seriously books once dismissed as what the Germans term Trivialliteratur.