Varieties of Realism III: Naturalism, Tragedy and the Unconscious

Abstract

If the novels of Danielle Steel, Barbara Cartland, Jilly Cooper or Barbara Taylor Bradford are discussed by literary critics, it is as objects for sociological analysis. The same is true of best-selling male authors such as Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth or Stephen King, and from this point of view the situation has not changed since the publication in 1932 of Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, or Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy in 1957. Since popular fiction is generally held not to ask the questions which authors such as Camus, Joyce, Proust or Thomas Mann raise in so interesting a form, this neglect is understandable. Literary criticism is appropriate as well as enjoyable when it forms part of an on-going dialogue about aesthetic, ethical, political or social values. It is almost a defining characteristic to say of fiction which is popular in the way that the novels of Barbara Cartland, Jilly Cooper or Danielle Steele are popular that it does not raise essentially contested concepts.

Popular literature and the role of the critic; some examples of realism: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities; their link, if any, with Barthes; a whiff of tragedy and a difference in critical attention.