Popular literature is an important and substantial study. It is a genre whose international impact is astounding. This is in reference to published work – mostly novels, but including other disciplines – that appeal to a mass audience, belong to a popular tradition and/or uses narrative techniques or fictional quality to appeal to and delight readers.
The international impact of this genre of published work is beyond belief in terms of the millions of readers and billions of dollars, fame and fortune for its authors such as J K Rowling and Robert Ludlum. In Guyana there has been a modest corpus in terms of numbers of novels published over the past 25 years or thereabouts. It is steadily rather than rapidly growing but its own impact is capped by a reading public that is not quite so large.
Even when limited to novels, the field covers many types. We will limit ourselves here to the more sophisticated, those