The Mode of Being of Popular Literature in the 20th Century

Abstract

The article is devoted to the functioning of literature (and, more broadly, cultural texts) in popular circulation and the transformation of their role in the 20th century. The starting point for the analysis is the link between commercialisation (as an immanent feature of the ‘lowbrow’ circulation) and the artistic quality of the output that is part of it. The examples of the phenomena under discussion come from different linguistic milieux. This highlights the transnational nature of popular works, which feature invariant solutions to plots. In these two contradictory yet simultaneous tendencies can be observed: schematisation and de-schematisation, which renews conventionalised solutions. The author also emphasises the role of English-language works in the creation of figures of the collective imagination. Their presence in the minds of readers and the transformations they undergo with the development of industrial society and urbanisation processes can be traced from the late 19th century to the 1990s. That is why the 20th century — a period of intense expansion of popular culture — is a cohesive cultural entity with distinguishable individual periods. They are usually associated with socio-political crises, with stories becoming a cultural response to them and, at the same time, their artistic reception in the imaginarium communis. In addition, this is a time of technological progress, significantly affecting the distribution and media-based mediation of cultural texts in popular circulation. Literature has ceased to be a ‘separate phenomenon’ in it, hence the need to look at it as a part of a larger whole, with which it enters into various relationships. The domination of English-language output during the analysed period is associated with the global hegemony of the Anglo-American entertainment model. At the same time — in the works available to Polish-speaking readers — its ‘over-presence’ stems from the appearance after 1989 of a large number of translations, which have significantly influenced domestic pop-culture; moreover, their popularity in the reality of the free market economy has been determined by the read- ers themselves with their purchasing choices. It is hard to speak in this situation of the existence of national models of popular culture, although undeniably there are authors who dominate the local publishing markets. And yet they, too, exist in the context of the global pop culture industry.