ABSTRACT
Popular literature or Genre literature has evolved through years and is now a well-established field of study. The collective interest of students as well as English teachers proposing this course in various universities has also increased. Such assumptions and prejudices related to popular fiction hinders the development of the category and the readers often tend to refer to popular fiction as ‘soft literature’, which is not as academically suitable as the mainstream dominant English literature. The popular/elite dichotomy impedes the critical analysis subjected to canonical texts. ‘Popular classics’ becomes a really arbitrary term which goes on to include one category completely and discards the other one (completely). ‘Popular classics’ becomes a self-contradictory category. The term ‘popular classics’ thus accounts for the fact that a text which is a classic was popular at some point of time and thus, had it been prejudiced against for being popular and widely read then it would not have become a classic.
