Dionysius of Halicarnassus On literary composition, being the Greek text of the De compositione verborum

It, too, was recognized and unmasked by scrupulous literary critics as an insignificant and possibly even dangerous form of escapism, unworthy of serious literary consideration but requiring severe moral opprobrium. When the techniques and conventions of popular art were appropriated by high modernist and postmodernist writers in the twentieth century, however, and even more recently, as the traditional standards of canon formation came under attack in the academy, literary critics once again exhumed the body of texts that made such a sensation in the 1860s, declaring them, almost melodramatically, to be authentic and valuable literary documents after all. If the sensation novel is considered as a legitimate example of «popular» culture, more significant for having been marginalized, its previous repudiation may be interpreted as revealing more about the serious threat it posed to the values of the dominant culture that rejected it than -479- about its genuine literary merits. The «plot» of such a critical history, in fact, underscores how deeply the production and evaluation of literary texts may be entangled with the shifting circumstances of the historical situation in which they emerge, and, more specifically, how profoundly the critical reception of popular literary forms might reflect the very cultural stresses and contradictions that both call those forms into being and seek to obliterate them ...»