Potboilers looks at the many forms of popular narrative - in print, film and TV. It considers the ways in they have been analysed in literary criticism, sociology, communications, media and cultural studies. The book introduces and summarizes two decades of debate about mass-produced fictions and their position within popular culture. It assesses the methods that have been used in these debates, focussing both on narrative analysis and the communications process. It explores generic conventions, the role of commercial strategies, and the nature of the audience with reference to crime fiction, soap opera, romance and TV sitcom. Distinctions between `high' and `low' culture have relegated many popular forms to the trash-can of `great' literature. This book takes stock of the methods and concepts used to analyse popular culture and argues for a non-elitist approach to the study of literature, film and television.

Excerpt from Pot-Boilers Dear Geoffrey Whitworth, - Considering for how many ages how many clever people have been complaining of their publishers, you might have supposed that no device for getting one of them into a scrape could have been left untried. Yet, so far as I can remember, no author has had the bright idea of denouncing his publisher, particularly, and by name, as accessory before the fact. I am willing to suspect my memory rather than my profession of being at fault in this matter; but that the practice is uncommon is most certain and that, surely, is very strange. No author thinks twice of saddling his friend, his wife, his mother, or even his mistress with the responsibility of having been the onlie begetter of some feckless cub or monstrous abortion; but on his publisher, the very man he should wish to injure, who ever thought of fastening the offence? Yet you cannot deny, my dear Whitworth, that this book is your fault. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Composed of reviews and articles published early in Clive Bell's career as an art and book critic. This book showed how strongly opinionated Bell was as a young man, with definite ideas about what is and is not "good art".Excerpt from Pot-Boiler.A critic, I submit, should judge a work of art, not in relation to the age and circumstances in which it was produced, but by an absolute standard based on the whole corpus of that art to which the particular work belongs. We do not want to hear how good "Tono-Bungay" seems by comparison with Mrs. Ward's last production. Marvellous, no doubt: so, no doubt, are Mrs. Ward's intellectual gifts by comparison with those of a walrus. But we want to have Mrs. Ward judged as a specimen of Humanity and "Tono-Bungay" as a specimen of Literature.