Leslie A. Fiedler (1917–2003)

From the Wikipedia: "In the long run, the vast output of popular fiction could no longer be ignored, and literary critics — gradually, carefully and tentatively — started questioning and assessing the complete notion of the perceived gap between "high art" (or "serious literature") and "popular art" (in America often referred to as "pulp fiction", often verging on "smut and filth"). One of the first scholars to do so was American critic Leslie Fiedler. In his book Cross the Border — Close the Gap (1972), he advocates a thorough re-assessment of science fiction, the western, pornographic literature and all the other subgenres that previously had not been considered as "high art", and their inclusion in the literary canon:

The notion of one art for the 'cultural,' i.e., the favored few in any given society and of another subart for the 'uncultured,' i.e., an excluded majority as deficient in Gutenberg skills as they are untutored in 'taste,' in fact represents the last survival in mass industrial societies (capitalist, socialist, communist — it makes no difference in this regard) of an invidious distinction proper only to a class-structured community. Precisely because it carries on, as it has carried on ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, a war against that anachronistic survival, Pop Art is, whatever its overt politics, subversive: a threat to all hierarchies insofar as it is hostile to order and ordering in its own realm. What the final intrusion of Pop into the citadels of High Art provides, therefore, for the critic is the exhilarating new possibility of making judgments about the 'goodness' and 'badness' of art quite separated from distinctions between 'high' and 'low' with their concealed class bias.

In other words, it was now up to the literary critics to devise criteria with which they would then be able to assess any new literature along the lines of "good" or "bad" rather than "high" versus "popular".

Accordingly,

* A conventionally written and dull novel about, say, a "fallen woman" could be ranked lower than a terrifying vision of the future full of action and suspense.
* A story about industrial relations in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century — a novel about shocking working conditions, trade unionists, strikers and scabs — need not be more acceptable subject-matter per se than a well-crafted and fast-paced thriller about modern life.

But, according to Fiedler, it was also up to the critics to reassess already existing literature. In the case of U.S. crime fiction, writers that so far had been regarded as the authors of nothing but "pulp fiction" — Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and others — were gradually seen in a new light. Today, Chandler's creation, private eye Philip Marlowe — who appears, for example, in his novels The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940) — has achieved cult status and has also been made the topic of literary seminars at universities round the world, whereas on first publication Chandler's novels were seen as little more than cheap entertainment for the uneducated masses.

Nonetheless, "murder stories" such as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment or Shakespeare's Macbeth are not dependent on their honorary membership in this genre for their acclaim.… (more)

Fiedler argues that American literature is immature because, instead of dealing with the mature themes of European literature -- love and death, it concentrates on friendship and terror, and, perhaps most immature of all, the friendships are between men. Women are almost entirely excluded. Despite the fact that this book has the reek of pre-Stonewall Freudianism, I still find much of what it has to say very compelling. There does seem to be a tendency of American novels to eschew women and to embrace the homosocial, and this does seem to have something to do with the wilderness and our attitudes towards race. However, even if you reject his overall argument, his homosocial readings of Huck Finn and the Leatherstocking tales is so bang on and explains so much about American television, that you really need to at least skim it if you want to delve into American literature or popular culture in any serious way.… (more)