Pip: Welcome to ashlit.in, where the reading list runs from ancient oral storytelling to urban café culture — and somehow that is a shorter distance than it sounds.
Mara: Today we’re working through Dr Aswathy Aravindakshan’s critical analysis of popular fiction — what it is, where it came from, and why the debate over whether it counts as real literature has always said more about critics than readers. Let’s start with the fiction that most people actually read.
Popular Fiction: What It Is and Why It Matters
Mara: The piece under discussion is a critical analysis of an article by Dr Arshad Ahammad A., which sets out to explain popular fiction — its meaning, its features, its history, and its cultural weight. The central tension is one literary studies has never quite resolved: is fiction written to entertain readers somehow less serious than fiction written to express a writer’s inner world?
Pip: The article draws the line early. On one side you have Sidney Sheldon, Agatha Christie, James Patterson. On the other, Dickens, García Márquez, Khaled Hosseini. And then it drops a number that reframes the whole argument.
Mara: Right — the article states that “popular fiction accounts for nearly 70 per cent of the world’s fiction market, underscoring its popularity among readers.” That is not a niche. That is the market.
Pip: Which makes the long critical tradition of dismissing it look a little like reviewing the weather for being too common.
Mara: The analysis traces that critical tradition directly. Matthew Arnold linked true culture to “sweetness and light” and positioned popular culture close to “anarchy.” Q.D. Leavis and Denys Thompson argued popular literature lowered standards because it was made for uneducated or semi-educated readers. The analysis notes these attitudes shifted — slowly, but they shifted.
Pip: One of the stronger moves in the piece is the framework of conventions and inventions. Conventions are the familiar scaffolding — the Cinderella plot, the detective structure, the haunted-house setting. Inventions are what individual writers bring that is new. The point being that formula and creativity are not opposites.
Mara: The analysis also traces popular fiction back to oral storytelling — the Panchatantra, the Jataka Tales, the Kathasaritsagara — arguing that written literature would not exist without those traditions. Even postmodern writers, the article notes, are shaped by them.
Pip: And the piece closes on upmarket fiction — works like Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca or Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl — which balance literary depth with popular readability. The gap between the two categories, the analysis argues, is narrowing.
Mara: The one area the analysis flags as underdeveloped is gender — the article identifies how romance, pulp, and horror fiction often portray women as dependent and marginalised, but does not explore how contemporary popular fiction pushes back against that. A thread left open, not resolved. And digital culture — fan fiction, online communities — gets a similar brief mention without much depth.
Pip: Still, as an introduction to why popular fiction deserves to be taken seriously, it earns its place.
Mara: The through-line here is legitimacy — who decides what counts as literature, and whether those decisions have ever really been about the writing.
Pip: Seventy percent of the market has been making its own decision for quite some time. Next episode, we keep reading.
Dr Aswathy Aravindakshan is a teacher, bilingual writer and artist with over two decades of experience in teaching English language and literature. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of English at NSS College for Women, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. Her blog, ashlit.in brings together academic resources, creative writing in Malayalam and English, and visual art. The platform features lecture notes, study materials, poems, reflections, short prose, and a curated collection of her paintings. Through this space, she seeks to foster learning, creativity, and meaningful engagement with literature and the arts.
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