ABSTRACT
I Typically, the bestseller shares a productive and marketing apparatus with other kinds of fiction and other kinds of book. General trade publishers will have bestsellers and ‘quality’ fiction cohabiting on their lists. Paperback houses will put their imprint on both kinds of book. Both quality novels and bestsellers will wholesale and sell through the same trade chains and (in many cases) reach the public via the same retail outlets. Until posterity sorts the matter out, there may even be some doubt as to a novel’s true character. ‘Literary’ works have taken off and become bestsellers, and books cynically designed as down-market bestsellers have eventually made a mark as ‘literature’. Some critics have plausibly argued that the qualitative opposition of ‘literature’ and ‘mass-produced fiction’ is a historically specific phenomenon which will mutate or wither away with future sociohistorical change. The distinction as to whether a work is literary or commercial will then be as anachronistic as the test of religious orthodoxy or heterodoxy is to contemporary book production.
