Page 273 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

262 ENGLISH STUDIES

following in mind: (1) the sphere of feelings and love is a particularly powerful
arena for femininity and, as such, an important site of feminist political struggle
and historical analysis; (2) romance, with its representation of the natural
inevitability of woman’s position in reproduction, presents us with a literary
history of patriarchal relations; (3) romance has been displaced by the hegemonic
fictional form of realism. It is therefore fruitful ground for the presentation of an
alternative form of writing to realism and for an investigation of why women’s
writing has been marginalized.
The renovation of the writing of popular fiction has begun in the work of
worker-writer groups:
It is usually young women writers who have adopted the short-story form
based on the life of the streets and the complex adolescent world of
courting and dating. Chelsea Herbert’s In the Melting Pot, Stella Ibekw’s
Teenage Encounters, Colleen Skeate’s Love Trouble, all explore ironically
and understandingly this milieu: what I would guess is that these writers
have in fact taken the form from the numerous romantic short stories which
are published in all the teenage magazines and converted the settings into
local ones and added their own realism to the form and used it for quite
different purposes from those inherent in the commercial stories. 99

If this analysis of the specific contested space which popular fiction occupies is
anything like correct, then the first implication is that books cannot be called
popular simply on the basis of a reading of them or on the basis of an analysis of
their interpellative structures/strictures. A complete analysis would have to
include not only textual analysis but also an account of what writing exists and is
read within popular leisure/culture (that is, the culture of subordinated groups
and classes). The site of analysis would no longer simply be the relation of these
books to other books but their relation also to languages of lived experience, and
such an analysis would have to grapple with the structural class and gender
relations which frame the field.
The renovation or reclaiming of popular fiction means asking which practices
of reading and writing, and how transformed, can become part of:

a new common sense and with it a new culture and a new philosophy
which will be rooted in the popular consciousness with the same solidity
and imperative quality as traditional beliefs. 100