Public reader discussion about The Common Man in the WeRead Catalog by Mack Reynolds.
By Panther_Cloudy
I’m trying to find more YouTube channels like CivilizationEx—he goes pretty deep into the history/lore side of fantasy books and I really enjoy it. I love his channel, but I’ve already watched basically everything, so now I’m stuck lol. Does anyone have recommendations for similar creators?
By starFable
I tried looking this up a bit, but I can’t seem to find anyone talking about it—maybe I’m just using the wrong search terms. Like, historically, wasn’t pretty much all writing “populist” to some degree? Homer probably wasn’t sitting around thinking, “Ah yes, this is Classical Literature.” He was just writing. And yeah, not many people could read, but still—it was basically recorded oral stuff that felt more for regular folks. Ovid didn’t write *Metamorphoses* thinking he was making highbrow literature. Same with Dante’s *Inferno*, or Shakespeare with *Hamlet*. Alexandre Dumas wasn’t exactly pretending his stuff was literary either. Charles Dickens was doing serialized fiction for regular readers. And *Dracula* feels pretty close to the cheap popular stuff from the time. So when did people start trying to separate “real literature” from “throwaway pulp”? And how did things that used to be seen as popular/cheap end up getting folded into the canon?