Jim Collins: Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture

Abstract

This work explores the context and circumstances in which traditionally classic and contemporary literary works have become part of mainstream, popular culture. While the title and cover emphasize books, the subtitle indicates accurately that the discussion moves beyond books to include film and popular culture more generally. Author Jim Collins addresses phenomena leading to the integration of literary work into general reading lists through the proliferation of book clubs, celebrity endorsements (e.g., Oprah’s book club), and film adaptations. Authors who were once solidly anchored in the ‘‘classic English literature’’ category such as Jane Austen and William Shakespeare have left the academy and been embraced by a diverse and ever-widening popular audience through the presentation of their work in contemporary movies based their work or which feature the authors or their work as contexts. The adaptation of literary work into motion pictures has exposed it to a new set of consumers and made it come alive through a medium with a high visual component. Collins also looks at the role played by booksellers—the Barnes & Noble featured titles as well as the recommendations on Amazon.com based on purchases made by other customers—in influencing what consumers are encouraged to read and how a query on one title can network to myriad others. To sustain his discussion, Collins uses his own work as well as the published work of others on cultural studies, film, literature and related areas to his premise. His examples include contemporary titles that might have been considered ‘‘literary fiction’’ in previous generations but now, given the evolution of readership, have been adopted by a wider population. He provides ample consideration of each text, examining its place in literary study, and discusses the topic of ‘‘self-cultivation’’— obtaining culture for oneself through literary texts—as a motivating factor in the popularity of ‘‘high brow’’ work. In discriminating between ‘‘devoutly literary’’ fiction and ‘‘literary genre’’ fiction, he creates the term ‘‘lit–lit,’’ which he defines as